By Popular Demand: Revitalizing Representative Democracy Through Deliberative Elections

By Popular Demand

By Popular Demand Revitalizing Representative Democracy through Deliberative Elections

John Gastil

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

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Los Angeles

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London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd . London, England © 2000 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gastil, John. By popular demand : revitalizing representative democracy through deliberative elections / John Gastil. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-520-22364-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Political participation—United States. 2. Elections—United States. 3. Representative government and representation—United States. 4. Forums (Discussion and debate). I. Title. JK1764.G37 2000 324.6'3'0973—dc21 99-086065 CIP

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum 'requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39 0.48-1992(R 1997) (Permanence of 'Paper) . ∞

Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

vii 1

2. Exit and Public Voice in Representative Democracy

10

3. Why Elections Fail to Ensure Accountability

32

4. Appraising Radical and Conventional Electoral Reforms

68

5. Public Expression in American Politics

90

6. Glimpses of the Deliberative Public

112

7. The Citizen Panels Proposal

137

8. The Political Impact of Citizen Panels

164

9. Electoral Experimentation

187

Notes

197

References

239

Index

259 v

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book, friends and acquaintances provided vivid illustrations of the key concepts in Albert Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice, and loyalty. Some grew weary of my endless ranting about elections and found tactful ways of leaving me to chatter by myself. Others hesitated to flee before voicing their concerns about details both minor and major in my manuscript, and the true loyalists continued to listen and offer critiques even after making unheeded but credible threats of eventual exit. The most influential of the voices in this group was that of Ned Crosby, who developed the idea of a “citizen jury” just one year after Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty went to press. In the thirty years since, Ned has conducted invaluable experiments in public deliberation and has seen his ideas influence both academics and civic reformers. I thank him for cajoling, challenging, and encouraging me as I wrote this book. For similar reasons, I am grateful to David Mathews at the Kettering Foundation and James Fishkin at the University of Texas at Austin. The innovative programs in public deliberation they created have stimulated my imagination for many years. Unbeknownst to me, this book has been developing in my mind since 1993, and many people have shaped my thinking during that time. Pat Baca, Michael Briand, John Daniels, John Dedrick, Jim Dillard, Dede Feldman, Mary Feldbloom, Murray Fischel, Cisco McSorley, Gilbert St. Clair, Todd Wynward, and my ever-campaigning parents vii

viii

Acknowledgments

have changed how I understand political philosophy and American government. I used to joke that by managing political campaigns and studying democracy, I had the advantage of two unrelated specializations, but these friends and family have led me to a bridge that joins those disciplines more securely than I had thought possible. I also extend thanks to the many friends and colleagues who have helped me develop the ideas in this book. Enjoying the luxuries of a critic, Perry Deess kept me sober yet injected some of the most radical ideas in this book, although he will deny association with my most grievous errors. Cindy Simmons made certain that my use of abstract theory was useful and not self-indulgent. Phil Weiser and Mark Smith helped me anticipate many counterarguments by being the first to make (and refute) them. Bob Kraig has sharpened my understanding of the limits of many proposed campaign reforms. Jim Dillard and Hank Jenkins-Smith helped me bridge political philosophy with empirical research. For offering helpful comments, I also wish to thank Lance Bennett, Haig Bosmajian, Stephanie Burkhalter, Michael Delli Carpini, James Fishkin, Tricia Gardinier, Gordon Gastil, Raymond Gastil, Kevin Sager, Todd Kelshaw, Valerie Manusov, David Messerschmidt, Gerry Philipsen, Sean Rockhold, David Ryfe, Kanan Sawyer, John Stewart, Barbara Warnick, and anonymous reviewers. I also thank Peter Dreyer, Cindy Fulton, and Reed Malcolm at the University of California Press for transforming a manuscript into this book. Without the encouragement of colleagues at the University of Washington and the opportunity to finish writing during two months in residence at the Kettering Foundation, I would not have completed this book. Kettering offered quiet shelter, and its staff and program officers provided invaluable assistance and a lively atmosphere conducive to thinking and writing. Special thanks go to Edwin Baiye, John Dedrick, Julie Fisher, Randy Nielsen, Rita Shanesy, Hal Schillreff, Estus Smith, Debi Witte, and the summer research assistants for making my visit both pleasant and productive. As a matter of custom, the final note in such a list of acknowledgments goes to spouse, children, and occasionally pets for trying to pull the author away from the desk to enjoy the outdoors and such. Fortunately, years of reading those apologies have led me to seek the pleasures of an active life without further prompting.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct. Public confidence in government is alarmingly low. One of the most reliable ongoing academic studies—the General Social Survey—has asked Americans a similar question about confidence in the U.S. Congress for over twenty years. In 1974, 17 percent of respondents had “a great deal of confidence” in Congress, but that figure dropped to 13 percent in 1984 and to 8 percent in 1994. Meanwhile, the percentage expressing “hardly any” confidence in Congress went up from 21 percent in 1974 and 1984 to 39 percent in 1994. The same survey found that more and more Americans believe that “most public officials are not really interested in the problems of the average man [sic].” In 1974, 64 percent of respondents agreed with that statement, and that number rose to 68 percent in 1984 and 74 percent in 1994.1 Not only do Americans have a particularly dim view of Congress, they place little trust in other elected officials. Public confidence in the executive branch of the federal government has declined in tandem with the drop in the public’s estimation of Congress. Roughly 10 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of confidence in Congress and the executive branch. When forced to choose, most survey respondents say that state governments “do a better job running things” than the

1

2

Introduction

federal government, yet only one-third trust state officials to “do the right thing” most of the time.2 More precisely, a majority of Americans have come to believe that elected officials do not represent average citizens. Most Americans think representatives are insincere and unresponsive to the public’s real concerns. Eighty-eight percent agree with the statement: “Government leaders tell us what they think will get them elected, not what they are really thinking.” Seventy-nine percent agree that “government leaders say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever they want.” Seventy percent agree that “the government is run for the benefit of special interests, not to benefit most Americans.”3 Whether these perceptions are accurate is difficult to judge. One might make this judgment by comparing surveys of elected officials with similar surveys of the general public. For example, a 1987 study found that members of the U.S. House of Representatives had similar views to those of the public on defense spending and foreign policy toward Central America, but representatives’ views were out of sync with the public’s on aid to minorities, minimum standards of living, government services, abortion, and foreign policy toward Russia.4 Another approach is to measure the fit between actual public policies and the public’s stated policy preferences. A team of investigators took this approach in a 1993 study of state governments.5 To permit a simple analysis of all fifty state governments and their citizens, the authors reduced public opinion and public policy to a single liberal–conservative scale. They found a strong correlation between their ideological ratings of actual state policies and the average ideology of the state’s electorate. One can quibble over the mixed results and methodological details of such studies, but the fundamental problem with both of these approaches is their reliance on conventional measures of public opinion. Democratic theorists stress the difference between surface opinion and an “enlightened understanding” of one’s interests in light of all available information.6 There is a profound difference between an unreflective preference based on unreliable information and a more deliberative judgment grounded in accurate data, careful reasoning, and the consideration of alternative viewpoints. To judge the correspondence between the policy priorities of the government and its constituents accurately, it would be necessary to have a more reliable indicator of the public’s enlightened or deliberative policy views.7

Introduction

3

Because few data exist on the public’s enlightened policy priorities, it is impossible to demonstrate directly that elected officials often fail to represent the interests of the larger public. Nonetheless, there is still a compelling reason to suspect such misrepresentation. Paradoxical though it may seem, officials interested in reelection should not, in fact, strive to represent the broader public interest. This is because in most campaigns for public office, fund-raising is a primary consideration, and candidates receive contributions from a relatively small number of sources. Wealthy donors, party activists, and myriad special interests give money to candidates who support their own views, and particular views are overrepresented on candidates’ contributor lists. Regardless of where candidates get their money, mass-mediated and even door-todoor elections are not exercises in public deliberation. Images, nonissues, and distorted policy debates decide close races far more often than genuine substantive differences in candidates’ policy stances. Politicians certainly do scrutinize public opinion surveys, but polls are counterproductive in two respects: rational candidates concern themselves only with the views of likely voters, who make up a small percentage of the general public; and, as explained earlier, conventional polls fail to measure the public’s more reflective concerns.8 When looked at from this perspective, the apparent “electoral connection” between voters and elected officials in Congress is actually part of the problem. When congressional scholars find similarities between the views of representatives and voters, they sometimes shrug in disbelief. As Robert Erikson and Gerald Wright muse, “It is as though all our individual ignorance and misinformed judgments cancel out, so that average perceptions and judgments are responsive to what the candidates say and do.” In these scholars’ view, “The result is a more representative Congress than the electorate sometimes seems to deserve.”9 Questions of merit aside, the views that Congress represents are not necessarily those that best serve individual representatives’ constituents, let alone the nation as a whole. Inattention and ignorance cause voters to notice (and oppose) only those policies that would impose large, direct short-term costs. Unfortunately, such policies (e.g., new taxes or the elimination of entitlements) may benefit the general public in the long term, and an officeholder’s responsiveness to these narrow concerns serves the official’s reelection imperative more than the public’s interests. In a sense, the material self-interest of a constituency is simply one more narrow interest directing a representative away from any broader public good.10

4

Introduction

To the limited extent that voters weigh issues during an election, they “override any broad concerns they may have with collective issues and vote in accord with ensuring immediate benefits. . . . Likewise, the legislators may share a growing concern with collective societal and economic reversals,” but their “electoral security” is best served by promoting “particularized programs” of concern to specific groups.11 More than simply compelling Congress to enact self-serving laws, shoddy public oversight frequently causes Congress to avoid “acting on problems or considering specific policy options because legislators fear retribution by ordinary citizens.”12 The result is that “the emerging collective problems of the new era thus go unacknowledged and tear away at the fabric of society.”13 In sum, elected officials may wish to act in the public’s enlightened interest for altruistic reasons, but the structure of federal, state, and local electoral systems instructs them to do otherwise. The importance of this problem is self-evident to any sincere democrat. In theory, representative government should discern and act upon the public’s will, whether that means fairly considering the myriad concerns of divided subgroups or discovering the shared aspirations of the public as a whole. If, instead, elected officials represent only the concerns of powerful, vocal individuals and interest groups with unrepresentative agendas, the fundamental goal of democracy is not achieved. When the political system itself reinforces this problem, the system itself must undergo change. Unrepresentative government is a serious failing, and low public confidence in that same government can prove even more dangerous. Healthy public skepticism toward authority has deep roots in American political history, and this attitude can hold up a democracy when extreme nationalism or hero worship threaten to topple it. Too much distrust, however, can prove just as disastrous as blind faith. Despite claims to the contrary, few politicians are mind-readers. Consequently, it is difficult for political leaders to discern the aspirations of a public that doubts their sincerity. An honest dialogue between the public and public officials can only take place when there is mutual respect between citizens and officeholders. Deep public mistrust of government makes it that much harder for government to get beyond conventional, but unreliable, manifestations of public sentiment, such as opinion polls, town meetings, and interest groups. Even when a government glimpses the public will, it has difficulty implementing and maintaining coherent policies without a broad pub-

Introduction

5

lic understanding and appreciation of them over a long period of time. A public that doubts the integrity of sincere school boards, mayors, and governors is unlikely to endorse the policies they adopt, however public-spirited. As a consequence, a governor’s welfare reform system or a mayor’s economic development program may never come to pass, because the refined policy preferences of special interests offer clear direction compared to the stubborn skepticism of a public unwilling to take government seriously. In addition, many public programs require active citizen participation to succeed. Community policing depends on active neighborhood watch programs, public schools need parental involvement, drug abuse prevention campaigns require awareness and use of government services, and anti-poverty programs benefit from partnerships with local businesses. When anything governmental is immediately suspect, public cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.14 Without a broad base of reasoned public trust in government and electoral systems, even successfully elected leaders discover that the public will not trust their actions. Without any leeway or public patience, leaders lack the flexibility to act.15 At the extreme, public distrust of politicians and elected officials can ultimately erode support for democratic institutions themselves. Such rebellion is unimaginable to most Americans, but history has not been kind to governments that have lost public support. It is not a leap from cynicism to outright rejection. If citizens believe that their government is not only inept but altogether illegitimate, and if they believe elections provide no recourse, they will eventually call into question the entire political system. Even when the government is, in fact, striving to serve the public’s best interests, if the public fails to recognize that fact, the government is in danger. For example, extreme anger toward government has played a role in the militia movement and the Oklahoma City bombing.16 For all of these reasons, growing political cynicism remains a serious problem, whether or not one shares that sentiment. Many modern reformers believe they have discovered the solution to these problems. The simplest solution is “more of the same.” The Reasoning Voter, Samuel Popkin’s defense of the low-information voter, concludes by arguing that American democracy only needs noisier, more exciting, and more aggressive campaigns. Rejecting calls for more “positive” or deliberative campaigns, Popkin argues that “there is no electoral problem in America that would be solved by restricting television news to the MacNeil-Lehrer format and requiring all the

6

Introduction

candidates to model their speeches on the Lincoln-Douglas debates.” Like Popkin, many public opinion and media scholars agree that the public’s ignorance and alienation is no bother so long as there are periodic elections and disagreements among the communication specialists who shape public opinion. In this view, citizens’ voting choices seem reasonable because they followed the cues given by competing liberal and conservative elites.17 As I explain in chapter 3, citizens’ reliance on simple “information shortcuts,” such as choosing candidates based on party membership, results in superficial elections and flawed voting choices. Most voters have difficulty constructing and articulating clear policy preferences through conventional elections, and voter ignorance and misjudgment do have a real cost. Amplifying existing communication channels will not fundamentally change the nature of American elections, improve public representation, or rebuild public trust. A more widespread view holds that the United States needs to implement one of several possible electoral reforms. These include new voting systems (e.g., proportional representation), term limits, public financing or strict regulation of campaign fund-raising, voluntary rules of campaign conduct, and the widespread distribution of voting guides. Each of these reforms has merits, which I discuss in chapter 4. If designed properly, some of the most popular electoral reforms can make elections more competitive, and others can improve the representation of minority viewpoints in legislative bodies. Some reforms can improve voter decision making by reducing the frequency of deceptive campaign messages or by delivering useful information to attentive voters. Nevertheless, even when taken as a whole, these reforms fall short: they provide no means of recording the public’s deliberative voice, and they make electoral outcomes unpredictable but no more reliable as a means of ensuring public-spirited representation. Moreover, public trust in government has continued to decline, even as states have adopted sweeping term limits and other campaign reforms. Many civic-minded reformers turn away from the blood and gore of electoral politics. Instead, they seek to restore public trust and representative government through renewed community life and citizen dialogue. In The Promise of Democracy, a companion to a PBS series on democracy, James Crimmins argues that “a good representative on a city council or in the state legislature can bring resources to a city, but she or he cannot make it a good city. . . . Change comes slowly in our capitols, and then only reluctantly.”18 In this view, which has become

Introduction

7

popular in democratic theory, electoral or governmental politics is separate from “citizen politics” or “civil society.” The greatest virtue of this approach is its ability to supplant conventional forms of public voice, which I describe in chapter 5, with innovative forms of civic self-education and community deliberation, such as those I review in chapter 6. At the extreme, this perspective holds that “civil society is in fact the domain of citizens.”19 Citizens can deliberate and take action in their communities without worrying about elections. When turned militantly inward, extra-governmental action by a local community can even lead to disconnection from public life, as when residential community associations use residence fees to replace public infrastructure with private goods and services (e.g., build their own roads, maintain private swimming pools).20 Interactions with public officials are nonexistent and unnecessary.21 There is no doubt that citizens can achieve much outside the official sphere of government decision making. Social bonds, community identity, civic traditions, and a degree of local independence create a wealth of “social capital” that helps local communities thrive both politically and economically. Studies of community politics are replete with examples of local citizen groups taking action on their own behalf, with or without any assistance from public officials and institutions.22 Even active communities with abundant social capital can remain disconnected from the electoral process, and they may do so at their peril. Representative institutions in the United States are powerful at the local, state, and federal levels, and a comprehensive theory of public deliberation must ultimately connect the community to its government. Some political philosophers, such as Michael Walzer, have tried to counter the “antipolitical tendencies that commonly accompany the celebration of civil society,” but the gap between community politics and formal representative institutions remains wide.23 Some reformers, however, have begun to connect face-to-face deliberation with elections. For the past three decades, public policy pioneers have experimented with different methods for developing and recording a deliberative public voice. Programs such as citizen juries and “deliberative polls” bring together representative samples of the public for face-to-face discussions with one another and with expert panels. After a few days of deliberation, these citizen bodies answer survey questions or draft recommendations to tell public officials what policies the larger public might endorse if it had the chance to deliberate. The judgments that citizens reach after participating in these brief deliberative forums

8

Introduction

often differ considerably from their previous opinions, and those changes suggest that traditional public opinion measures do not always match the public’s more reflective policy views.24 When these random sample forums are conducted in an electoral context, they give insight into how a deliberative public might judge specific candidates and campaign issues. Unless taken farther, even these deliberation programs will fail to build public trust and improve representation. As I argue in chapter 6, the participants in quasi-juries and large deliberative polls, such as the 1996 National Issues Convention, may experience profound attitudinal and behavioral changes, but their numbers are too small to have a noticeable impact on larger public attitudes and electoral outcomes. Many citizens vicariously participate in these exercises through newspaper accounts and broadcast coverage, but the impact on those people is relatively small.25 In some views, the solution to this problem is simply one of scale. Past efforts may have had a limited impact, but future efforts will succeed by invigorating the public and drawing it into an ever-widening network of public forums and deliberative practices. Unfortunately, this approach requires the development of a powerful sense of civic responsibility and a nationwide commitment to active, ongoing participation in public life. As David Ryfe points out, “Asking citizens to do better is a perfectly reasonable goal for deliberative reformers,” but “asking them to contradict their basic sensibility toward politics will probably be unsuccessful. Care must be taken to craft principles of deliberation which speak to people as they are rather than imagine them as they will never be.”26 Thus, for random sample forums to create a powerful public voice with significant electoral impact, it is necessary to use the existing capacities of the public to connect face-to-face deliberation in small groups with the voting choices of the mass public on election day. In chapter 7, I propose such a link. My basic recommendation is that voters should have access to the results of representative citizen deliberation on the candidates and issues that appear on their ballots. Using small random samples of the general public, government institutions could sponsor deliberative panels on past legislative actions, individual candidates, and ballot measures. Panel participants could summarize the results of their deliberations, and federal election officials, secretaries of state, and county clerks could communicate those results to the larger voting public through various means.

Introduction

9

For these citizen panels to achieve their intended purpose, they would have to produce high-quality judgments, and citizens would need to be willing and able to consider panel results when voting. If subject to self-deception, “groupthink,” and other decision-making illnesses, the panels could falter by reaching unwarranted conclusions and promoting the election of unqualified and unrepresentative candidates. If voters find the panel results to be irrelevant, elitist, or confusing, the panels would also fail to have their intended impact. Chapter 8 addresses these dangers and explains why the panels would generally reach sound and influential judgments. Finally, chapter 9 suggests an experimental approach to implementing citizen panels. By gradually testing some of the main claims underlying the citizen panel reform, it will be possible to gauge both its necessity and electoral impact before institutionalizing panels nationwide. The citizen panel proposal, however, is the end of this story. The virtues of the panels relative to other reforms are most apparent once one firmly grasps the problems at hand. Those problems, in turn, are best understood when framed within a simple model of political behavior. To that end, I draw upon the work of the economist Albert Hirschman, who bridged the intellectual chasm between economics and political science in his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman sought to explain the performance of large firms and complex organizations, and I have modified his model to describe the behavior of public officials and voters. This abstract model is valuable because it provides a simple framework for examining the democratic ideal (chapter 2), existing political practices (chapters 3 and 5), suggested reforms (chapters 4 and 6), and a new proposal for citizen panels (chapters 7–9). Framed within the theoretical model, the American political system’s twin problems of public trust and representation, noted at the outset of this chapter, will become more apparent. When carried through the subsequent chapters, the model will also explain why past attempts to solve those problems have failed and why citizen panels might succeed.

CHAPTER 2

Exit and Public Voice in Representative Democracy Under any economic, social, or political system, individuals, business firms, and organizations in general are subject to lapses from efficient, rational, law-abiding, virtuous, or otherwise functional behavior. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Democracy doesn’t exist. It never has and never will. The distance between the democratic ideal and any actual government, past or present, is so vast that some theorists don’t even use the term democracy to describe real political systems.1 Given this gulf, one might question the value of examining alternative models of how democracy is supposed to work and, instead, ask to move directly to the practical matter of improving existing political systems. If the reader shares this skepticism, I beg indulgence, because it is difficult to assess and overhaul a system without first understanding how it is supposed to function in theory. Examining different models of democracy is also worthwhile because this brief review reveals that every model of democracy gives at least some emphasis to electoral accountability and public expression. Competitive elections and the expression of political dissent are two ideas central to this book—the real threat of “exit” (in this case, rejecting an unresponsive public official) and the use of a public’s “voice.” Later in this chapter, I present a novel application of exit and voice to elections for public office. The present task is simply to demonstrate their general relevance to democratic theory. Readers may disagree about which democratic model America should or does, in fact, follow. If the central concepts examined in this book fit into diverse conceptions of the democratic ideal, then the insights in subsequent chapters should prove useful to a wide range of readers. 10

Exit and Public Voice

11

ELECTIONS AND PUBLIC VOICE IN IDEAL MODELS OF DEMOCRACY David Held provides a taxonomy of democratic models that range from classical Athenian democracy to modern capitalist democracy.2 I shall examine many of these models to illustrate the roles of public voice and elections in each conception of the democratic process. Despite the dramatic differences in the designs of various democratic models, each is structured to ensure a strong public voice and elected representatives who are either accountable for their actions or relatively powerless. Though quasi-democratic systems of local rule have existed at various times throughout ancient history, the Athenian model has left behind the most powerful legacy. This is partly because of the elaborate design of the Athenian political system and partly because written records of Athenian democratic political philosophy have survived. Athens’s government mixed direct election of public officials with selection by lot and the regular rotation of public offices. Even those who were duly elected had short terms in office and, in most cases, were not eligible to run for reelection. This system did not ensure accountability, but it removed the problem of entrenched incumbency by imposing what are now called term limits. At least in its ideal conception, the Athenian system gave members of the public many opportunities to share their concerns with officials. Short terms, the wide distribution of public offices, and frequent meetings of powerful public assemblies were designed to prevent single individuals from having undue influence on policy decisions.3 The modern socialist model of democracy (not to be confused with actual systems such as the former Soviet Union) draws upon the Athenian tradition of face-to-face democracy. This ideal model uses many of the same institutions, but for large-scale systems, it replaces the direct assembly with a pyramidal council structure whereby the top-level planning body is connected through individual representatives back to thousands of lower-level, grassroots assemblies. In addition, this system places more emphasis on maintaining socioeconomic equality among citizens to ensure equal influence on policy. Public voice is the engine of this system, and the near-complete removal of representation by largescale elections makes the system dependent upon the quality of public ideas and their expression.4 Modern participatory democracy maintains direct avenues for public involvement in policymaking through referenda and initiatives. The

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Exit and Public Voice

hallmark of participatory democratic models is the challenging and powerful role of the citizen. Citizens may not have much direct authority, but they are expected to be active in their local communities, political parties, and national policy debates. By eagerly and regularly engaging in public discussion, citizens may develop strong opinions and become skilled at the forceful expression of their values. Civic skills and habits will ensure that citizens have a clear voice and that they make their views known both directly and through reasoned candidate choices during regular elections of public officials.5 Deliberative variants of the participatory model go a step further and encourage regular dialogue among citizens to bring their many views and voices together in search of an elusive moral consensus.6 But even deliberative democrats recognize that the public’s voice must be coupled with an effective electoral process to ensure that public officials remain accountable for the actions they take as authorities.7 Historically, relatively few large-scale political systems have modeled themselves on these three democratic ideals, partly because the models depend upon a highly motivated, skilled, and educated public. Many democratic theorists have held a more pessimistic view of the capabilities of the citizenry, and they have recommended a government that guards “the people” from themselves. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison advocated this “protective” model of democracy when he argued that “you must first enable the government to control the governed.” In Madison’s view, the public often forms self-destructive factions, so individual citizens should have only the power to vote for their representatives. Separate branches of government further insulate the political process from factionalism. Even though this model views the general public’s voice as bothersome, Madisonian democracy still relies upon periodic elections to provide some measure of accountability.8 Madison’s vision had a powerful influence on the design of the American political system, but modern American political theorists more commonly describe the U.S. system as resembling a pluralist model of democracy. The basic difference is that pluralists view factions not as dangerous but as “a structural source of stability and the central expression of democracy.”9 America’s most influential student of democracy, Robert Dahl, developed the pluralist model in an attempt to describe the actual practice of American politics. Dahl argued that regular elections and political competition among diverse minorities and coalitions ensure a representative process. He later came to recognize

Exit and Public Voice

13

important differences between the pluralist ideal and the American political system, but his pluralist model remains largely unchanged. Like the Madisonian model, it relies on elections to ensure the accountability of public officials, but it also stresses the importance of public expression. If the people do not speak, pluralist government cannot craft policies that provide what the average citizen desires. By contrast, the Madisonian model views general public expression as white noise, and the more participatory models look for a “general will” among the public’s many voices. A final, capitalist model of democracy takes Madisonian and pluralist ideas to the logical extreme. The capitalist model of democracy assumes that individuals act in a way consistent with their own selfinterest in both economic and political life. Public officials are no exception to the rationality assumption, and they make political decisions that serve their interest in reelection. As a result, individuals and groups have political influence in proportion to their base of economic and political power. If these assumptions hold, then the political system should reach equilibrium so long as there are competitive elections to ensure proper political market performance. Even in this model, public voice still exists, albeit in the form of “market corrections” when officials misjudge the balance of power among competing interests. Regular, competitive elections are also pivotal, for without them public officials would begin to behave like unresponsive monopolies. The capitalist model of democracy is loathsome to many because of its unkind assumptions about human behavior and its reduction of public life to economic competition. Despite its alien form, however, even this purely economic model of democracy still has a place for minimalistic conceptions of voice and electoral action.10 Modern democratic theorists disagree about which of these models best describes the American political ideal and existing political institutions.11 In practice, the American system is a hybrid of different models, with no one of them fully realized. Referenda and other ballot measures give citizens a chance to govern themselves directly, but the U.S. president is elected only indirectly through the Electoral College. Some egalitarian policies—from public education to campaign contribution limits—aim to equalize citizens’ potential political influence, yet the most powerful economic interests wield considerable power in the political marketplace. Despite these complexities, it is possible to summarize both American political practices and ideals within a single abstract model, which the remainder of this chapter will develop.

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Exit and Public Voice

THE EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY MODEL When Albert Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, his primary goal was to help readers understand how both competition and the expression of dissatisfaction could improve the performance of failing companies, nonprofit organizations, and nations. Hirschman observed that firms and organizations often experience “repairable lapses” in performance, and if these go unnoticed, they can result in “permanent pockets of inefficiency and neglect.”12 A profit-seeking manager or wellintentioned president may not recognize the decline unless one of two things happens: 1. Some customers stop buying the firm’s products or some members leave the organization: this is the exit option. As a result, revenues drop, membership declines, and management is impelled to search for ways and means to correct whatever faults have led to exit. 2. The firm’s customers or the organization’s members express their dissatisfaction directly to management or to some other authority to which management is subordinate or through general protest addressed to anyone who cares to listen: this is the voice option. As a result, management once again engages in a search for the causes and possible cures of customers’ and members’ dissatisfaction.13

Historically, people have used both exit and voice as response mechanisms. Many a firm has lost its customer base because it could not continue to provide the highest-quality product, and innumerable customers have tried to induce change through direct complaint. Many organizations have disappeared after their members found a better place to work, live, or play, but many members have worked for change from within an organization before giving up all hope and abandoning it. Hirschman argues that whether people use the exit or voice option depends on their attitudes and circumstances. His model assumes that exit is the dominant reaction mode when better alternatives exist and switching products or organizations entails little cost. In a perfectly competitive market, consumers will always favor superior products and quickly exit any commercial relationship with firms that cease to produce the best goods available. Alternative products and organizations are not always present, however, and voice’s role increases “as the opportunities for exit decline, up to the point where, with exit wholly unavailable, voice must carry the entire burden of alerting management to its failings.” Exit is also more costly when it concerns “standardized durable consumer goods requiring large outlays” or, in organizational terms, when individuals have made a considerable investment in the or-

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ganization.14 In these cases, exit loses its appeal, because desertion might require learning a new computer operating system or starting on the bottom rung in a new organization. Before exercising their voices, however, people take into account a similar cost associated with expression. There are both the opportunity cost of forgoing the exit option and the “direct cost of voice which is incurred as buyers of a product or members of an organization spend time and money in the attempt to achieve changes in the policies and practices of the firm from which they buy or of the organization to which they belong.”15 Using an economic example, the cost of driving to a new grocery store with lower prices is lower than taking the time to compose and effectively deliver a complaint to one’s previous store, not to mention the savings that are lost while waiting for the old store to respond by lowering its prices or improving the quality of its goods and services. Because of these costs, the regular exercise of voice often depends upon a modicum of loyalty to a firm or organization. “As a rule,” Hirschman argues, “loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice.” In the absence of loyalty, consumers will quickly switch from an inferior merchant, but if they like a particular store’s produce, they may first complain to the grocer before shopping elsewhere for their leafy green vegetables. Such loyalty is not simply a matter of “faith.” In comparison with acts of pure faith, Hirschman explains, “the most loyalist behavior retains an enormous dose of reasoned calculation.” People will be more likely to exercise their voice and develop loyalty if they perceive that such actions have an impact over time. If loyal customers’ voices go unheeded when they complain to the grocer about inferior produce, their loyalty will decline, leading to their eventual exit. Although not necessarily one, the loyalist “looks like, or turns out to be, a sucker” when his or her attempts to salvage a declining firm or organization fail.16 Even loyal customers or members may lean toward the exit option if they do not recognize a clear means of exercising their voice. “The propensity to resort to the voice option,” Hirschman explains, “depends also on the general readiness of a population to complain and on the invention of such institutions and mechanisms as can communicate complaints cheaply and effectively.”17 In other words, an organization or firm will only receive feedback via voice if it has in place a straightforward complaint mechanism that its member-customers are accustomed to using. Exit is a relatively automatic process in this model, whereas

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voice requires social systems to elicit and properly channel internal dissent. In sum, Hirschman’s model demonstrates that people can respond to declines in product or organizational quality through exit and voice. Dissatisfied people will use the exit option when there are clearly superior and available alternatives and they lose little investment by switching products or affiliations. Exit will also be the favored response when exercising voice involves high opportunity costs and direct costs. People will make their voices heard, though, if they have developed loyalty to the offending organization based upon its perceived responsiveness. Resort to voice will also be more likely if efficient complaint mechanisms are available and familiar.18 Hirschman uses this model to derive some surprising insights about both economic and political behavior. In the thirty years since the model was introduced, Hirschman and other scholars have found even more ways in which the model applies to local and national politics. Only some of these observations have relevance to my own use of the model in this book, but it is useful to review those insights to better understand the original purpose and power of the model.19 When one considers the interplay of exit, voice, and loyalty, it becomes apparent that some of the fundamental assumptions of neoclassical microeconomic theory are false. Just as democratic theorists have their ideals, so do economists. The difference is that political philosophers (normally) have the modesty to recognize their ideals as just that—ideal types that one dare not dream will take solid form. Many economists, by contrast, begin with the ideal model of a perfectly competitive economy and then presume that the mythical “invisible hand” sweeps markets free of inefficiencies. If consumers and entrepreneurs behave rationally in pursuit of their self-interest, competition will ensure the maximization of their interests, and the dysfunctional firms that fascinate Hirschman will cease to exist. Economists and many other social scientists accept the general tenets of this idyllic model.20 Hirschman’s writings, however, explain why this theory often fails to explain complex economic realities. First, actual competitive economies can, paradoxically, prove less satisfying to consumers than those with only a handful of firms. As Hirschman explains, A competitively produced new product might reveal only through use some of its faults and noxious side-effects. . . . Competition in this situation is a considerable convenience to the manufacturers because it keeps consumers from complaining; it diverts their energy to hunting for the inexistent im-

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proved products. . . . The manufacturers have a common interest in the maintenance rather than in the abridgment of competition—and may conceivably resort to collusive behavior to that end.21

Simply put, a multiplicity of equally unsatisfactory options is better for a producer than a monopoly. Producers will still scratch and claw the competition to lure more temporary customers to buy their products, but they understand that so long as no one produces a superior product, none of them need change their manufacturing processes. A dash of competition may also be welcomed by a monopoly that knowingly produces a substandard good or service. Hirschman argues that inefficient monopolies actually invite some degree of competition “as a release from effort and criticism” when their power “rests on location and when mobility differs strongly from one group of local customers to another. If . . . the mobile customers are those who are most sensitive to quality,” their exit permits the monopolist “to persist in his comfortable mediocrity.” The “lazy monopolist may actually have an interest in creating some limited opportunities for exit” because the most quality-conscious customers are also “likely to be most demanding and querulous, in case of any lowering of standards.” By showing them an open door, the monopolist encourages their exit and thereby reduces the chance that they will voice harsh criticism that could diminish the confidence and satisfaction of other consumers.22 Just as the absence of exit makes a lazy monopolist nervous, healthy competitive firms should dread the silence of a market where consumers speak only with their checkbooks. If consumers quickly switch products in response to even minute shifts in quality or price, a declining firm will be “wiped out before it will have had time to find out what hit it, much less to do something about it.” Among other factors, Hirschman argues, it is primarily loyalty that causes influential customers and organization members to “stay on longer than they would ordinarily, in the hope or, rather, reasoned expectation that improvement or reform can be achieved ‘from within.’ ” This measure of “irrational” loyalty conflicts with the ideal of perfect competition, but it actually results in a superior outcome because it gives firms the opportunity to correct themselves before collapsing. The ultimate threat of exit ensures long-term efficiency, but the willingness to use voice prevents the waste of invested resources that results when an otherwise rational firm briefly missteps.23 These three insights into illusory competition, lazy monopolies, and the value of loyalty apply to the political realm as well as to the marketplace. Regarding his description of false competition among equally

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inefficient firms, Hirschman notes that “competitive political systems have frequently been portrayed in just these terms. Radical critics of societies with stable party systems have often denounced the competition of the dominant parties as offering ‘no real choice.’ ” Though Hirschman recognizes that noncompetitive political systems are hardly agents of rapid social change, he acknowledges that “the radical critique is correct in pointing out that competitive political systems have a considerable capacity to divert what might otherwise be a revolutionary ground swell into tame discontent with the governing party.”24 Public agencies and institutions also sometimes have the same incentives to promote modest competition as do lazy monopolists in the private sector. Hirschman offers the example of public schools: Suppose at some point, for whatever reason, the public schools deteriorate. Thereupon, increasing numbers of quality-education-conscious parents will send their children to private schools. This “exit” may occasion some impulse toward an improvement of the public schools; but here again this impulse is far less significant than the loss to the public schools of those member-customers who would be most motivated and determined to put up a fight against the deterioration if they did not have the alternative of the private schools.25

For political processes, as for markets, the optimal balance then is a healthy mix of competition and dissent. Just as a perfectly competitive economy is too quick to destroy firms that err, so can highly competitive multiparty politics promote underdeveloped political parties. With an abundance of parties to choose from, “members will usually find it tempting to go over to some other party in case of disagreement. Thus, they will not fight for ‘change from within.’ ”26 These few observations are only some of the insights into political life that one can glean from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman’s work provided other observations about the dynamics of two-party systems, ideological bias, and overreliance on exit and voice. Subsequent essays by Hirschman and other scholars have applied the theory fruitfully to urban neglect, party competition in Israel, Japanese party politics, and the 1989 revolution in the German Democratic Republic. In addition, one scholar has applied Hirschman’s ideas to political reforms aimed at democratic empowerment to criticize reforms that fail to balance exit and voice.27 The same concern is central to this book, but before I use Hirschman’s model, I wish to make substantial changes in its details and level of analysis. The remainder of this chapter introduces these modifications.

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APPLYING THE MODEL TO ELECTIONS Few scholars have extended the exit, voice, and loyalty model to the political process, beyond its role in shaping individual political organizations. An exception is Eva Sorensen, who recognizes the potential value of redefining “exit” in relation to a representative government: If we take a closer look at political life, exit is limited by the obvious fact that it is difficult to exit from the nation-state. A “genuine exit” calls for a change of nationality. Nevertheless, exit plays a central role in political life in liberal democracies in which the primary means of empowering the citizens is voting. Through voting the individual is granted the power to exit one party to the advantage of another. . . . Voice channels . . . are available through membership of a political party and through participation in the public debate in the media.28

I go beyond the traditional exit, voice, and loyalty model in another sense. With only minor exceptions, the remainder of this book examines how citizens influence individual elected officials, as opposed to political parties, public agencies, or governments.29 This shift from organizational behavior to the actions of public officials is substantial, because exit and voice are now understood to influence the behavior of individual representatives, rather than complex organizations. In practice, many elected officials operate as the heads of small organizations that include paid staff and informal advisers. In the interest of simple prose, however, I shall refer to these officials as individual actors who respond (or fail to respond) to the voice of the electorate. If the main actors in this new model are elected officials, the central question is what causes representatives to experience what Hirschman might call “lapses from virtuous behavior.” The democratic models reviewed earlier all agree that the first task of political representatives is to serve the public. Even the Madisonian model of democracy recognizes that the lay public should be the ultimate judge of whether its representatives are acting in the public’s best interest. The variance in democratic theorists’ confidence in the quality of public judgment is somewhat moot, as every democratic system uses elections of one kind or another to prevent representatives from becoming entrenched and unresponsive. In every democratic ideal, public officials must be held accountable for their actions as representatives of the citizenry. Whether one believes in a general will of the people or simply in an average interest among conflicting visions of the public good, it is important to

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understand the circumstances under which elected officials represent the public’s interests. To influence the actions of their elected officials, voters can use exit, voice, or both response mechanisms. In this context, the terms exit and voice take on a different meaning, and in place of the former I shall speak of “electoral rejection.” As I use the term throughout this book, attempted electoral rejection is voting for an alternative candidate when a public official seeks reelection. By backing an opponent, a voter seeks to discard the current official and replace him or her with a candidate perceived to better represent personal or collective interests. Just as a consumer switching products has no assurance that such a change will prove beneficial, the voter takes a chance on a new official. Unlike the consumer changing shampoo brands, though, the voter cannot change officials autonomously; instead, the success of the individual’s vote depends upon the votes of others. Only when the electorate is thought of as a body does electoral rejection carry with it the certainty of successful exit: thus, collective rejection is the successful election of an opponent who challenges an incumbent. I move from the individual to the collective level when I refer to electoral rejection, and I stress the uncertainty of the individual voter’s attempt to reject an incumbent official or administration. In part because of the limited influence of a single voter’s electoral choices, the public’s capacity for dissent is at least as important as its attempts at electoral rejection. As I use the term, voice is an attempt to influence the public decisions made by elected representatives. Hirschman’s more narrow use of the term would equate voice only with the expression of dissent against actions that a citizen finds distasteful. I wish to use the term more broadly to include praise, neutral input on a specific issue, and requests for specific votes that are not sparked by the belief that the official will act otherwise. Any citizen’s message to a public official may influence that official’s actions in the future, whether or not the citizen intended to change the official’s decisions. Whether a given voter chooses to rely upon this voice or backs an opposing candidate in an election depends upon the same considerations presented in the earlier discussion of firms and organizations. Some of these factors become more complicated, but at a high level of abstraction, Hirschman’s economic model and the voting model I present are quite similar. Whether a dissatisfied constituent voices dissent or attempts electoral rejection depends primarily upon past experience using voice with an incumbent and the estimation of an opposing can-

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didate’s potential for superior representation. Simply put, if a voter perceives that the incumbent has responded well to dissent and the opponent is not much better, it is likely that the voter will remain loyal to the incumbent and rely upon voice to express any dissent. By contrast, if the incumbent is unresponsive and the opponent would better represent the voter’s interests, it is more likely that the voter will attempt electoral rejection by voting for an opposing candidate. Without taking any other variables into account, one can see clearly the costs and benefits of loyalty in this model. If voters in a given city council district have very little loyalty toward their incumbent councilor, they will reject the incumbent in the next election so long as an opponent seems to have greater potential to represent their interests. A sitting councilor from this district may rarely hear constituents’ voices, because of their unwillingness to voice concerns, and this lack of communication may decrease the councilor’s chances for reelection even further. Over time, because of its readiness to reject imperfect officials, this district would also forgo the benefits of long-term incumbency. By contrast, a district with extremely high constituent loyalty would suffer the opposite fate. This second district would reelect councilors to many terms in office, but overreliance on voice would undermine the electorate’s credibility and permit the incumbent to act with impunity. The sitting councilor might hear many complaints, but if the district’s loyalty was blind, dissent would manifest itself only as voice and never as a real electoral challenge. Between these extremes, a healthy public develops a modicum of loyalty toward responsive elected officials but conditions that loyalty on actual performance.30 THE ROLE OF DELIBERATION Though it may not be obvious, this simple model relies upon two critical assumptions. This model assumes that voters know what government actions are in their own best interest, and it assumes that voters know a great deal about the intentions and actions of incumbents and challengers. In reality, voter self-awareness and political knowledge vary tremendously over time and across different social groups, so it is preferable to change these underlying assumptions into model variables. This makes the model more complex, but it also highlights the importance of two forms of public deliberation. For citizens to exercise their voice and vote effectively, it is necessary that they have sound insight into both their own interests and the virtues of competing candidates.

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Because they depend upon clarification of interests and the articulation of policy judgments, the expression of an authentic public voice and well-informed attempts at electoral rejection are only likely to occur when they follow a period of sustained deliberation. I define public deliberation as discussion that involves judicious argument, critical listening, and earnest decision making. Following the writings of John Dewey, full deliberation includes a careful examination of a problem or issue, the identification of possible solutions, the establishment or reaffirmation of evaluative criteria, and the use of these criteria in identifying an optimal solution. Within a specific policy debate or in the context of an election, deliberation sometimes starts with a given set of solutions, but it always involves problem analysis, criteria specification, and evaluation.31 Lest this process sound too tepid, I should stress that the deliberative discussion of problems and solutions can include emotional appeals. As Jane Mansbridge insists, “We must avoid the traditional, frequently male, mandate to ‘keep emotions out of it.’ . . . Appeals for the common good require an emotional and cognitive probing of one’s own feelings of empathy, admiration, revulsion, or horror.” Mansbridge recognizes that “appeals to emotion can be dangerous,” and she suggests that “emotional appeals must therefore stand up to reflection in tranquillity.”32 The point is simply that the expression of strong feelings has its place in deliberation. Having defined public deliberation, I now wish to clarify the meaning of democratic deliberation, a term that further specifies the ideal relations among the people taking part in a discussion within a democratic political system.33 To be democratic, deliberation must include diverse participants from the larger public, and it should use an egalitarian decision rule (e.g., consensus or majority rule) to resolve conflicts among participants. Some deliberative theorists, such as Joshua Cohen, argue that “ideal deliberation aims to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus,” but striving toward consensus does not require the use of a strict consensus procedure, which gives each participant veto power over any collective decisions.34 In addition, participants in democratic deliberation must have equal and adequate opportunities to speak, and they must be able to comprehend what other participants say. Participants in democratic deliberation also have a responsibility to avoid manipulative discourse, provide other participants with any relevant knowledge they possess, and consider carefully what others say. Using Jürgen Habermas’s terms,

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participants in an “ideal speech situation” must have adequate opportunities to examine the meaning of one another’s statements and challenge one another’s “validity claims.”35 If all of these conditions are met, a discussion can be called both deliberative and democratic. The basic purpose of deliberation is to make sound decisions. Though the philosopher John Rawls used the term sparingly in his 1971 treatise A Theory of Justice, deliberation is the central mechanism in his method of evaluating public policy. Rawls’s influential moral theory argues that people can judge a policy by imagining that they are unaware of their actual social position. Behind this hypothetical “veil of ignorance,” people can objectively evaluate the degree to which a policy protects the public’s basic freedoms and ensures a decent quality of life for the least well-off.36 Rawls argues that such a philosophical exercise is most fruitful when conducted in a deliberative process: We normally assume that an ideally conducted discussion among many persons is more likely to arrive at the correct conclusion (by a vote if necessary) than the deliberations of any one of them by himself. . . . Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments. At least in the course of time, the effects of common deliberation seem bound to improve matters.37

Rawls adheres to the commonsense notion that many minds are better than one at finding an optimal solution to a problem. Though public skepticism about the value of committee decisions persists, Rawls’s faith in group discussion appears to be well founded. Research in social psychology and small group communication has found that, on balance, group discussion generally results in higher-quality decisions than do methods that rely upon single individuals. Moreover, past research has shown that group discussion leads to better decisions than noninteractive methods of collective decision making. In sum, groups produce better average decisions than individuals, and groups that engage in deliberation outperform nominal groups that simply pool individual opinions without open-ended discussion.38 Deliberation is even more important for complex social and political problems. Unlike technical or scientific puzzles, public policy problems are inextricably interconnected, difficult to define and study, and impossible to remove completely. The evaluation of alternative solutions to public policy problems requires value judgments, as well as technical analysis.39 The latter feature is most important: political deliberation is not only valuable as a means of grappling with complexity, it also serves democracy by helping citizens clarify the implications of their

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basic values for public policy choices. The more enlightened a public’s understanding of its own interests, the more likely it is to govern itself effectively.40 Disentangling the beliefs and motivations underlying surface-level policy preferences is difficult, and deliberation can transform disagreement by reducing initial opinions to sets of contestable “presumptions,” only some of which will stand up under scrutiny.41 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson make a slightly different argument for deliberation. Though these authors recognize the virtue of discussion as a means of pooling information and developing citizens’ interests, they emphasize its value as a legitimate method of addressing moral conflicts. “Deliberation,” they argue, “is the most appropriate way for citizens collectively to resolve their moral disagreements not only about policies but also about the process by which policies should be adopted.” Gutmann and Thompson criticize those who would leave moral issues for the courts to resolve or bar their entrance into the political realm altogether. In their view, political deliberation is the only fair and effective means of handling moral conflict. Deliberation requires both citizens and representatives to present reasons and justifications for their views and to consider alternative views. When successful, deliberation can confer legitimacy upon even majoritarian policy decisions, so long as those decisions take conflicting views into account. Even if it does not produce a solution acceptable to all, it may at least preserve mutual respect among the parties to an unresolved debate.42 Relating these advantages to the exit, voice, and loyalty model, deliberation can strengthen the public’s voice, ease its ability to collectively reject unrepresentative officeholders, and inspire a modest loyalty to responsive elected officials. A strong public voice requires that citizens develop their interests in relation to policy and articulate those interests clearly. Public deliberation has precisely those qualities when it takes place in an open setting and is inclusive of a diverse sample of the larger public. At least those directly participating in deliberation are likely to sharpen their own understandings of public policy problems and the solutions that best reflect their basic values. If public officials learn the results of the deliberation, the process can also serve as a means of clearly expressing the participants’ judgments to elected representatives. Having developed their interests more fully, participants in a deliberative discussion are better able to evaluate candidates effectively. Once voters know how they view an issue, they are more likely to ex-

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amine candidates’ positions and actions on that same issue. Unrepresentative public officials stand out under such scrutiny. Moreover, to the extent that open deliberation orients discussion toward the common good, such discussion increases the likelihood that voters will support policies that they believe will serve the general public’s interests. If those beliefs develop simultaneously during collective deliberation, voters will be more likely to reach shared judgments, and that may, in turn, lead to similar candidate evaluations. If more evaluations are in sync, then voters should more often act in concert and collectively reject unrepresentative elected officials. Simply put, deliberation might lead voters not just to collective policy judgments but also to collective electoral action opposing (or supporting) incumbent officials, depending on the correspondence of those officials’ actions to the voters’ shared interests. At the same time, an electorate that engages in deliberation with its public officials might develop a stronger loyalty toward those officials who demonstrate not only responsiveness but also respect for the deliberative process. Democratic citizens perceive deliberation as a legitimate means for arriving at public decisions, and officials who conflict with majority opinion but explain their views and consider voters’ positions might withstand opposition during elections because of their willingness to deliberate. As suggested earlier, a measure of reasoned loyalty benefits the representative system by keeping in officials who might misstep from time to time yet remain genuinely responsive to voters’ concerns. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CITIZENS Deliberation’s value extends beyond the reasoned judgment it permits, but to understand this additional virtue, it is necessary to make one final addition to the revised exit, voice, and loyalty model. The effective use of a citizen’s voice and vote also depends upon a set of psychological variables necessary to sustain democratic political action. In chapter 1, I argued that healthy governments require public trust and that meaningful deliberation can bolster the citizenry’s confidence in its political institutions. In addition, deliberation can change how citizens view themselves, their abilities, and their responsibilities. To this point, the revised model has assumed that citizens recognize the value of participation and have confidence in their abilities to speak and vote wisely. As with deliberation, it is worthwhile to remove this assumption and consider these psychological characteristics as variables in the model.

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The effective use of political voice and vote depends upon the maintenance of democratic institutions that reinforce important public attitudes and beliefs. When authors write about the importance of a strong “civil society,” some of what concerns them is the public’s willingness and ability to use its opportunities for political expression and electoral action.43 Hirschman calls this the “readiness” to exercise voice; citizens are ready to voice dissent or attempt electoral rejection when they have both the necessary skills and confidence in those abilities. In the case of public voice, citizens cannot express their concerns effectively without basic literacy and a modest public-speaking ability. In addition, citizens must know how to reach public officials, whether they seek a face-toface audience or simply want to send a letter. Anyone reading this book surely has those modest skills, but it is important to remember that over 20 percent of adult U.S. citizens have only rudimentary literacy skills, and only a quarter of the citizenry know the names of their U.S. senators.44 Also, people often develop skills without gaining confidence. This phenomenon is so widespread among people of all backgrounds that psychologists have given it a prominent place in the literature on human behavior. Self-efficacy is the belief that one can competently perform an action, such as brushing one’s teeth, defending oneself against an attacker, or writing a letter to the editor.45 Despite its general significance, self-efficacy is not always an important influence on people’s behavioral choices, and its relevance to political life can not be taken for granted. Research in political science, however, has found a clear and consistent impact for this variable. These studies have demonstrated a strong connection between a person’s political self-efficacy and his or her willingness to vote and express dissent through both conventional means, such as letter-writing and demonstration, as well as more radical means, such as civil disobedience.46 The readiness to use one’s voice, then, depends not only upon objective skills but also upon one’s subjective assessment of those same skills. Complicating matters further is the difference between one’s own perceived abilities and the skills one attributes to fellow citizens. Obviously, a person’s confidence in his or her ability to express dissent is unshaken by any doubts as to other people’s communication skills. But one’s sense of group efficacy is important when one considers expressing dissent through a group or organization.47 A good deal of political expression comes through collective entities, and if citizens have doubts about the competence of groups they have joined (or are considering

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joining), they are less likely to try channeling dissent through those bodies. Why try making oneself heard through a citizen action group if one suspects that the group is incapable of drafting a coherent press release, let alone of reaching agreement on what its members wish to say? A modicum of group efficacy is necessary to maintain active participation in community associations, public forums, and interest groups designed to channel public voices to policymakers. In addition, without a related sense of group efficacy (i.e., confidence in the competence of the general electorate’s ability to conduct an equally thorough candidate screening), a talented and self-assured voter might decide that an attempt at electoral rejection is not worth the bother. Even with a strong sense of self- and group efficacy, citizens may still not exercise voice, believing that their actions, although competently performed, will have no impact. Cognitive psychologists refer to this belief as “outcome expectancy”—the expectation that one’s actions will result in a desired outcome. Hirschman underscores the importance of this expectation by arguing that loyalty ultimately depends upon the expectation that one’s voice will have influence.48 Past research has shown that in politics, as well as other spheres of action, a person’s outcome expectancy is a powerful predictor of whether he or she will take actions that require effort.49 Only if citizens believe that public officials will act upon their advice will they go to the trouble of writing, calling, e-mailing, or directly addressing elected representatives.50 Political scientists call this belief “perceived system responsiveness.” It bears some correspondence to the political trust discussed in chapter 1. With regard to voting, one may or may not trust that casting a ballot for a candidate is likely to influence the outcome of an election. As for voice, citizens vary in the degree to which they trust elected officials to give a meaningful response to one’s expressed concerns. In these ways, low public trust is one of the important beliefs underlying sustained political action.51 If public expression and electoral rejection are so difficult, why do people take political action at all? To answer this question, I focus on the relatively simple act of voting. Voters unsure of the impact of their vote might still do so. Some voters might make a pessimistic assessment of their ability to make an accurate and influential voting decision yet vote nonetheless because they place such a high value on the influence that they might achieve. This consideration, which psychologists call “outcome valuation,” is regularly paired with self-efficacy and outcome expectancy in research on behavioral choice. With regard to voting,

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however, this belief hinges on the unspoken hope that one’s single vote will be the one that “makes the difference,” and save in the smallest local elections, that is closer to an act of faith than a rational calculation. Research on voting in the United States suggests that the more common motivator to vote despite one’s sense of helplessness is the lingering sense of civic duty that many citizens feel. Whether one thinks of duty as a behavioral habit, a cultural reflex, or a heartfelt conviction, it appears that many people continue to vote “because that is what citizens do.”52 Once again, this set of political beliefs and orientations is important because it undergirds sustained citizen participation in public affairs. Democratic political institutions must “shape the psychology of citizens,” because the system depends upon the involvement of those citizens. Deliberation, the expression of a strong public voice, and effective electoral action all require a citizenry with self-confidence, some confidence in system responsiveness, and genuine concern for the outcomes of political actions.53 CIVIC NEGLECT And what of those who neither place a high value on their political influence nor glow with civic pride? If exit is daunting to this group of citizens, do they then turn to voice? Perhaps some idle cranks fall into that category, but many more citizens use neither exit nor voice. A subset of these know that their interests are not well represented, and another subset have not even made that initial calculation. It may come as a surprise, but Hirschman’s original model had nothing to say about this residual group of individuals who have opportunities for exit and voice but do not use them. One group of scholars using the model to study urban politics quickly discovered this group of citizens. In their view, failure to respond when perceiving political problems amounts to system neglect. This term underscores the fact that the use of neither exit nor voice is still a behavioral choice—the choice to neglect the system through nonresponse.54 Civic neglect is easy to recognize. When neglect becomes a prevalent response mode, one can expect large percentages of a public to stop voting altogether. These nonvoters are unlikely to follow politics closely. They skip political sections of the newspaper, avoid political television programming, and even eschew policy- or campaign-oriented political conversation. When asked about their views, citizens neglect-

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ing the system will demonstrate limited political knowledge and undeveloped opinions, but they will demonstrate strong distrust of government and elected officials. When open and egalitarian political institutions are in place, civic neglect can still become widespread if citizens lack the sense of efficacy and motivation necessary to use those institutions effectively. Even when the public is brimming with confidence and civic responsibility, neglect might still result from a sober assessment of the difficulty of making the sound judgments that underlie effective voice and voting choices. In a typical political system, such “rational neglect” is likely, given the difficulty of arriving at deliberative judgments. The rational utility-maximizing denizens of economic models are not only presumed to doggedly pursue their self-interest, they are also assumed to know their interests. By contrast, in the model of representative democracy presented herein, a fundamental problem is the discernment and articulation of citizens’ policy judgments. Chapters 3 and 5 demonstrate the rarity of adequate deliberative judgments, but here I wish to stress the profound difficulty of this problem even in theory. Before a citizen can recognize the failure of an elected official to represent his or her interests, a citizen must first determine what those interests are.55 When one looks beyond self-interested policy judgments to a citizen’s estimation of what policies best serve the public interest, citizens must also make the effort to understand the needs and concerns of their fellow citizens—a challenge far greater than coming to know one’s own interests. Once interests are developed, they must become more than tacit if they are to be of use in evaluating the performance of elected officials and the merits of political challengers. Much of what we come to know about ourselves and our social world is understood only unconsciously, and although we can generally use that knowledge in practice, it is difficult to apply it systematically unless it becomes conscious.56 Both exit and voice are also equally dependent on a related accomplishment—the successful evaluation of the incumbent’s performance with regard to a citizen’s interests or those of the general public. Now, the competent citizen must not only formulate interests but determine whether or not those have been (and will continue to be) served. Has the representative in question voted “properly” on relevant legislation? Has the representative made the voter’s key issues top priorities while in office? Unless the voter can connect interests to performance, the voter will not know whether to reject an incumbent representative, let alone whether to exercise voice as a means of protest.

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If the voter does decide that a public official has done a poor job as representative, yet another task lies ahead. As discussed more thoroughly in chapter 3, a voter must seek out alternative candidates as a means of electoral rejection and make similar judgments about the future performance of those candidates. This task is difficult because challengers usually have incommensurate political track records, if any at all. A voter must often make judgments based on hunches, analogies, and the misleading claims of the candidates themselves to gauge the likelihood that the opponent both shares the voter’s views and will prove capable of pursuing those interests with the same vigor, skill, and resources as the incumbent. Requiring interest formation and articulation, as well as incumbent and challenger evaluation, political exit is not the same as switching long-distance phone companies. The physical act of voting is not daunting to most citizens, but calculated acts of public expression and attempted electoral rejection are time-consuming and difficult. Only with the cognitive and emotional underpinnings described earlier can one expect citizens to avail themselves of opportunities for effective public expression and electoral action.57 DELIBERATIVE POLICYMAKING As presented thus far, this model highlights what can go wrong in a representative system. In this final summary of the model, I demonstrate what happens when such a system operates properly. This description reveals a final, implicit element of the model. The point of government—even democratic government—is good public decision making. Just as citizens can only make sound judgments after deliberating, so public officials can only govern wisely after careful research and reflection.58 Deliberative citizens might reach some clear judgments on particular issues and treat their representatives as sworn delegates, expected to do exactly as they have been instructed, but more often representatives must conduct their own deliberations and act as trustees of the public’s best interest.59 From one perspective, the model of representative democracy that I have described is designed to promote just such deliberation by public officials. As shown in figure 1, citizens’ choices about how to use voice and votes indirectly depend upon official deliberation. If officials reach a sound deliberative judgment about the public interest and then act

Exit and Public Voice

Figure 1.

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Model of Democratic Deliberation and Representation

upon that judgment, they should fare well on election day so long as citizens reach the same judgment in their own deliberations.60 After all, in the ideal model of representative democracy, when citizens evaluate policies and candidates, they take into account the actions of elected officials. This feedback loop ensures accountability for officials’ actions, and that, in turn, creates an incentive for officials to deliberate carefully lest their judgments and subsequent actions fail to impress the deliberative electorate. To summarize, voting and public voice have important roles in the democratic process, no matter how one defines democracy. In addition, a healthy representative political system requires ongoing policy deliberation and intensive candidate evaluation during campaigns. Both of these processes require active citizen deliberation about private and public interests. Without an underlying set of political beliefs (e.g., selfefficacy, public trust, and civic responsibility), deliberation and the twin mechanisms of voice and vote may fall into disuse, resulting in widespread civic neglect. The model of democracy developed in this chapter demonstrates the necessary features of a healthy representative system. To promote the creation of deliberative public policy decisions by elected officials, a political system must have institutions that sustain ongoing citizen deliberation, nurture a resilient and motivated public, and provide clear opportunities for the influential expression of political voice and the real threat of electoral rejection. The next four chapters will assess the success of U.S. political institutions in maintaining a vigilant citizenry and stimulating productive political responses to lapses in public representation.

CHAPTER 3

Why Elections Fail to Ensure Accountability Everyone who grows up in our society is bound to become aware, at some level of consciousness, that an individual vote is more nearly a form of self-expression and of legitimation than of influence and that the link between elections and value allocations is tenuous. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle

In theory, elections in representative democracy ensure accountability through lively candidate competition and careful voting decisions. In the ideal election, voters begin with a relatively well-developed sense of self-interest and some conception of the public good. Though those views may shift slightly over the course of an election, voters remain steadfast in their values and never lose sight of their primary concerns. Meanwhile, a list of qualified but diverse candidates appears for every public office, and voters have a wide range of choices to consider. Voters examine the candidates by meeting them face-to-face, attending public forums, listening to speeches, watching debates, and sampling the offerings of a wide variety of relevant printed and electronic media. The candidate whom voters judge most suitable is then charged with pursuing the public’s interest as its representative. When the next electoral cycle begins, if the official seeks reelection, his or her voting record becomes one of the electorate’s primary considerations when comparing the incumbent with the new set of challengers. Most Americans’ experience of elections is far from that ideal. Voting is, as Murray Edelman observes, closer to “a form of self-expression” than an act of political influence. Benjamin Barber aptly describes the uninspiring experience of most voters: “Our primary electoral act, voting, is rather like using a public toilet: we wait in line with a crowd in order to close ourselves up in a small compartment where we can re32

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lieve ourselves in solitude and in privacy of our burden, pull a level, and then, yielding to the next in line, go silently home.”1 This chapter examines why elections fail to provide a strong connection from deep public concerns to real public policy. The problems underlying this failure are underdeveloped public judgments, superficial voter evaluations of candidates, and the shallow pool of contestants for elected office. Together, these problems thwart attempts at electoral rejection of unrepresentative incumbents, thereby making officials less accountable for their actions. In addition, public awareness of these problems leads citizens to neglect the political system, worsening the very problems that spark voter apathy and cynicism in the first place. INTERESTS AND IDEOLOGY A fundamental requirement for democratic self-governance is that the public must develop clearly defined interests that it can articulate during and between elections. One of the principles of democracy is that an individual is the best judge of what is in his or her best interest. Democratic political processes presume that it is best to let each individual articulate his or her own wants and needs. Other people may sometimes be in a better position to judge one’s interests; however, there is no way to know when that is the case, so it is safer to assume the competence of every individual to decide his or her own interests. This principle, which Robert Dahl calls “the strong principle of equality,” does not presume that individuals know their own interests; rather, it just asserts that no individuals “are so definitely better qualified than the others” that they should have the ultimate authority to make decisions on behalf of those others.2 Presuming self-awareness does not make it so, however. Does the typical American voter, in fact, know what policies are in his or her best interests? And if voters ultimately seek to discern the interests of the larger public, can they tell what is best for the city, state, or nation as a whole? It is impossible to answer those questions because there is no independent ground from which to judge the accuracy of citizens’ perceptions of the public good. Some philosophers make compelling claims that freedom and equality are relatively “neutral” standards for making such a judgment,3 but I wish to ask a more simple question. Regardless of the substance of their views, do individual citizens have wellinformed and coherent policy positions? By “well-informed and coherent,” I mean three things. First, a wellinformed view is one that is based upon a modest amount of relevant

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information—both facts about an issue and awareness of different perspectives on an issue. The more informed the average voter is, the better the result. Second, the public’s policy judgments are coherent if they connect logically to one another and to underlying values. Different logics can lead from the same basic values to different policy choices, but the question is whether those connections have been drawn at all.4 Third, to be considered coherent, a citizen’s views on one issue should not contradict his or her views on another issue. In sum, an informed and coherent belief system starts with a set of fundamental values, then uses the fruits of a rigorous information search to connect those values to mutually reinforcing policy choices. Well-informed Americans ought to know a good deal about public issues and government. Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter studied this subject in depth in What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (1996). Using survey data from the National Election Studies, they reported discouraging results: “Only 13% of the more than 2,000 political questions examined could be answered correctly by 75% or more of those asked, and only 41% could be answered correctly by more than half the public.” On questions regarding political institutions and processes, the median respondent gave correct answers 49 percent of the time. On foreign affairs, the median was 44 percent, and on domestic politics, the median was 39 percent. Across the population, knowledge was distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with relatively few respondents having very high or low knowledge scores, except that a relatively large percentage of Americans knew very little about domestic politics. The poor performance of respondents on these knowledge questions led the investigators to conclude that the American public’s judgments are “hardly the stuff of informed consent, let alone of a working representative democracy.” The authors also found that despite all the varied changes in public education, journalism, and politics over the past fifty years, “citizens appear no less informed about politics today than they were half a century ago.” The bad news is that they also “appear no more informed.”5 Evidence from both public surveys and psychological experiments shows that most Americans’ political views are often not only poorly informed but also rather incoherent. One of the most comprehensive and well-supported theories of public opinion paints a humbling portrait of how we think about political issues. The political scientist John Zaller brought together previously unconnected findings on attitude instability, public opinion shifts, media discourse, reelection campaigns,

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and survey method effects to create the “receive-accept-sample” model of public opinion. According to this model, we routinely receive media messages on issues, and the less sophisticated among us accept these messages uncritically (those more politically savvy simply filter out messages that conflict with their predispositions). When asked to state our opinions (or cast a vote), we sample among the messages we have accepted, which have become “considerations” in our heads. The view we state is merely the average of these considerations that come to mind. One of the central implications of this model is that “individuals do not possess ‘true attitudes,’ in the usual technical sense of the term, on most political issues, but a series of considerations that are typically rather poorly integrated.” Most people do not “have ‘just one attitude’ on issues.”6 A useful metaphor for understanding Zaller’s claim is the “attitude pie.” In this view, attitudes don’t exist as coherent entities, as popularly imagined. Instead, a typical person holds conflicting views on an issue, plus a measure of neutrality. In two dimensions, one can think of an attitude as a pie sliced into thirds—one piece favoring a policy, one piece opposing it, and one piece representing a neutral attitude. When asked to give an opinion in a survey, a citizen might say she supports welfare reform, yet that support might only represent the largest “slice” of her different views on the issue: 40 percent of her thoughts on the subject might support reform, but another 35 percent might oppose it, with neutrality accounting for the remainder of her attitude.7 “Latitude theory” suggests another way of understanding indefinite attitudes. This theory “depicts a preference not as an optimal point on a dimension of opinion, but as a line segment, within which all points may be roughly equivalent in attractiveness.”8 A person’s attitude toward free trade is not really a single point on a spectrum (e.g., 5 on a ten-point scale), but rather a range of acceptable positions (e.g., 2 to 6 on the same scale). In this view, attitude instability is typically just movement within this range of acceptability, and citizens are not so much indecisive as they are flexible. An open-minded person always welcomes conflicting considerations, and an ideal judgment weighs different facts, ideas, and perspectives in making a decision. That decision might remain open to reconsideration in light of new information and insight, but it is unlikely to change in the meantime because it was reached through careful deliberation and reflection. Though latitude theory and the attitude pie metaphor suggest ways in which unstable attitudes can still be well formed, the evidence

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Why Elections Fail to Ensure Accountability

marshaled by Zaller suggests otherwise. More often than not, ambivalent and undefined attitudes appear to be the result of limited information and inadequate reflection. For most citizens, Zaller’s receive-accept-sample model suggests that the main determinant of policy views is the balance of opinions expressed in the mainstream media. Thus, the public’s reported attitudes hinge upon the average attitudes communicated through radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and other mass media. Careful analysis of such media messages is a task far beyond the scope of this book, but two observations about the quality and authenticity of the public attitudes created through this process should give one pause. First, as the media critics Jay Blumer and Michael Gurevitch note, “Less and less of the political communication diet serves the citizen role—due to the predominant presentation of politics as a game; the irrelevance of campaign agendas to the post-election tasks of government; and the diminished space and time devoted to policy substance.”9 Both qualitative studies and systematic content analyses have found that the political news reaching mass audiences in the United States focuses more on the game of politics than the substance of policy and elections.10 Second, there is no doubt as to the fact that paid media (e.g., political advertising and public relations campaigns) overrepresent the views of wealthy individuals and corporations. Political observers and cultural critics have provided ample evidence of this bias, but it is nearly inevitable that an uneven distribution of wealth results in an uneven distribution of paid, mass-mediated political messages.11 When this steady stream of unbalanced messages flows into the drying creek bed of political journalism, the result is a river of public opinion biased toward particular interests. The history of American public opinion, however, demonstrates that public opinion does have some independence from media influence. The reason is that relatively sophisticated and ideological citizens tend to choose the messages they sample; even more important, these citizens do not uniformly accept the messages they receive. Regardless of the balance of messages in the media, these citizens can form what appear to be informed and coherent policy views by sleight of hand. If a person can at least form a general ideological bias, he or she can rely on political elites who share that ideology to reach judgments instead: “Ideology . . . is a mechanism by which ordinary citizens make contact with specialists who are knowledgeable on controversial issues and who share the citizens’ predispositions.” In other words, so long as at

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least some of the mass-mediated voices that citizens hear represent their own orientation, ideological citizens can “learn” stable, consistent attitudes from those elites. In this way, Zaller argues, “Ideology can make a valuable contribution to democratic politics in a society in which people are expected not only to have opinions about a range of impossibly difficult issues, but to use those opinions as the basis for choosing leaders and holding them accountable.”12 Ideology is not the norm for citizens. As Lance Bennett argues, “Most individuals struggle with internal belief conflicts, making the measurement of stable beliefs and dispositions beside the point, not to mention an unlikely result.”13 Though the pure concept of ideology may be somewhat mythical, it is still useful to estimate how many voters think along such lines. Based on a careful examination of National Election Study data, it appears that roughly half of the American electorate are “nonideological,” in that their political attitudes and behaviors show little ideological consistency. Roughly 20 percent of the electorate show unambiguous signs of ideological organization, usually along the lines of the liberal-conservative dichotomy, which remains popular in American politics. Another third of the electorate demonstrate at least some higher-order structuring of their political beliefs.14 Other researchers have demonstrated that even nonideological thinkers still organize their political beliefs into lower-level schemas,15 but only those with an ideological orientation that corresponds to ongoing political discourse will have the advantages Zaller describes. One can only “make contact with specialists” and adopt their ideologically consistent policy positions if one recognizes one’s ideology in them. Even for the fifth of the population who think ideologically, Zaller’s characterization is far from flattering. Citizens who are politically knowledgeable and ideological obtain large amounts of political information and simply filter out ideologically inconsistent views. The result is far from a well-reasoned set of attitudes. Instead, these citizens develop a crude copy of the views of elites who appear to share a similar ideological orientation. As a result of careful filtering, ideological citizens appear to have developed a coherent set of informed attitudes corresponding to a more basic set of core values. In truth, these citizens have assumed that like-minded elites hold attitudes that the citizens themselves would hold if they thought through the issues. That assumption permits ideological citizens to articulate views on a broad range of policy issues without devoting scarce time and energy on researching those same issues. Sometimes, however, citizens’ genuine

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interests will not correspond to those of their favored ideological elites. Elites and the lay public often diverge upon class lines, such as when liberal and conservative elites fail to recognize the social and economic realities confronted by average citizens.16 More frequently, the unique circumstances of individual citizens result in a set of particular interests that diverge from generalized ideological positions. A liberal Kansas farmer, for instance, is likely to have many interests that differ from those articulated by Ted Kennedy and other representatives of the liberal elite. The most serious problem, however, is sorting out disagreements among ideologically similar elites. If one identifies oneself as a conservative, it is not enough simply to average the views of Pat Robertson and Steve Forbes. Within every ideological camp, there are deep divisions on important issues that make it difficult for citizens to learn and adopt consistent views. More generally, elites model attitudes that dismiss alternative points of view, and they pass this extremism down to citizens who might otherwise prefer a more balanced policy position. This problem becomes acute when citizens seek to understand the larger public good. Ideological filtering of elite messages does not help a citizen develop a broad public perspective on current issues. Such a viewpoint would listen to and incorporate diverse viewpoints and seek out common ground upon which all parties can stand. Citizens cannot develop an inclusive public voice if they systematically dismiss ideologically divergent views.17 Despite these limitations, there is still value in picking up “cues” from ideological elites. There are simply too many issues for average citizens to study and develop nuanced views on every policy debate. Identifying oneself with a liberal or conservative ideology and adopting the views of corresponding elites has its hazards, but it does permit a busy citizen to take strong positions on complex issues. So long as citizens must make a wide range of political choices, such cue-taking is an attractive alternative to exhausting research or studied indifference. HOW VOTERS EVALUATE CANDIDATES Just as citizens have difficulty developing well-informed and coherent policy views, they also face a serious challenge when asked to make voting decisions. The popular science-fiction television program The X-Files ends its opening montage with the now-famous phrase, “The truth is out there.” For most elections, this is the case. A diligent voter with unlimited resources and cognitive abilities can find out which can-

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didate will best represent his or her interests. Discovering the “truth” about candidates is just a matter of time and effort. But learning enough information about every viable candidate in every competitive race would take a considerable effort and a very large stretch of time. On a typical even-year general election ballot, voters often have over a dozen elections to consider. The high-profile races—president, governor, and Congress—are followed by elections for secretary of state, the state legislature, judgeships, county and city positions, school board seats, and anything and everything else down to the most obscure local offices. In many states, one can add to those offices a list of referenda, initiatives, and other ballot measures. To undertake the study of each election would require both skill and will. Research skills would be necessary to reach a broad range of information sources about the candidates, and intellectual and political talents would enable a voter to decode and process the information obtained. No voter would put those skills to such hard use, however, if he or she did not also have the conviction that doing so would prove useful. Returning to the psychological concepts introduced in chapter 2, a voter would need enough self-efficacy to believe that he or she can competently perform exhaustive candidate evaluations, an expectation that the research will result in correct evaluations, and the confidence that fellow voters will be able to do the same. Underlying those beliefs, to overcome the voter’s awareness of the low probability of his or her vote influencing the election’s result, there must also be a driving sense of duty or a powerful concern about its outcome. Few voters have the necessary constellation of abilities, beliefs, and motivation to study the candidates on their ballot tirelessly in this way. RETROSPECTIVE VOTING

Nonetheless, voters do attempt to make candidate evaluations, and how they reach those imperfect judgments varies considerably from one election to the next. The most widely studied race of them all—the presidential election—appears to trigger a special form of candidate evaluation. In presidential elections, citizens often engage in what Morris Fiorina has called “retrospective voting.” Many Americans evaluate presidential incumbents based on the actual condition of the nation. In addition to taking into account candidate issue stands and their promises for the future, voters take a hard look at what they have experienced under the president’s administration before deciding whether

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Why Elections Fail to Ensure Accountability

to reelect.18 To take an extreme example, an event such as the Great Depression can doom a president’s chances of reelection no matter how artful a dodger that politician may be. Though much modern presidential advertising threatens to mislead or even deceive unwary voters, it appears that the electorate selects presidents partly based on the state of the economy, among other “hard data.” To paraphrase the famous sign posted in the Clinton campaign headquarters in 1992, it is, indeed, the economy, stupid. Once again, such voting behavior is the exception. Fiorina argues that the retrospective voting model does not work very well outside of the presidential election. In his view, the model’s weakness stems from the decline of political parties in America. He cites the example of the 1978 elections, before which the Democratic Party held power in both the White House and on Capitol Hill. In that year’s congressional elections, voters’ ratings of Democratic incumbents depended “only weakly and erratically” on perceptions of government’s success at addressing “inflation, unemployment, or anything else of a programmatic nature.”19 More important, crude retrospective voting is usually an ineffective method of candidate evaluation. If a voter looks at the condition of the local or national economy and judges candidates on that basis, the voter is using an objective but not necessarily relevant piece of information. Forces beyond the control of public officials cause most economic shifts, and an incumbent may deserve no credit or blame for one’s fortunes. Presidents can have a noticeable short-term economic impact, and economists have named such election-year tinkering “the political business cycle.” If successful, the president might trigger a brief spurt of economic growth, but voting based on that short-term change would be a mistake. Even when voters more broadly judge the incumbent’s overall performance, few know much about the actual performance of most of their public officials. Some voters may judge presidents based on overall economic trends, but how many voters have solid indicators of the performance of state legislators, judges, school board members, and secretaries of state?20 A study of the perceptions of city and county services in Kentucky found evidence of considerable error in citizen evaluations of the local government: citizens sometimes associated nongovernmental functions with public institutions, they sometimes attributed functions to the wrong institution, and they often failed to recognize some of the functions that local government performed.21 A

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study of gubernatorial elections found similar signs of misjudgment: idiosyncratic voter perceptions of the economy significantly influenced vote choices, but there was no relationship between actual economic indicators and electoral outcomes.22 Nonetheless, there is evidence that voters sometimes make accurate connections between legislators’ actions and real short-term policy outcomes. The congressional scholar Douglas Arnold describes these linkages in detail in The Logic of Congressional Action. In Arnold’s view, a representative’s action is “traceable” when “a citizen can plausibly trace an observed effect first back to a governmental action and then back to a representative’s individual contribution.” Relatively few effects are traceable; most go unnoticed by stakeholders, have multiple interconnected causes, or have little visible impact on individual constituents. With the aid of concerned interest groups, however, citizens do sometimes trace connections between individual representatives and specific outcomes. This potential for citizen oversight prevents career-minded legislators from enacting disastrous policies that would cause unnecessary and immediate harm to their constituents.23 Unfortunately, Arnold points out how this same process results in the avoidance of good legislation and the passage of unsound bills. Because citizens only notice short-term negative impacts on their own lives, “legislators’ fear of retrospective voting impels them to avoid . . . politically infeasible policies,” including some proposals that would produce good long-term outcomes. Instead, legislators look for “politically attractive policies” that appear to have the same benefits (in the short run) but “spread the costs more widely, impose them as later-order effects, or push them further into the future.” When casting about for such an alternative, representatives sometimes run into “politically compelling policies” whose “intended effects are popular, irrespective of whether the proposed means will really achieve those ends.” Meanwhile, legislators tend to avoid “politically repellent options” because citizens either fail to see how the instruments could bring about the desired effects (e.g., subtle economic incentive mechanisms) or provide benefits only to disliked or marginalized social groups. Overall, “to the extent that citizens are poor policy analysts, they may obtain policy instruments they favor but fail to get the policy outcomes they really want because their chosen instruments are incapable of producing the desired effect.”24 In sum, retrospective voting does occur in relatively high-profile elections. At first, this approach to electoral decision making appears to fit the ideal model outlined in chapter 2: voters assess the performance of

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incumbents and reward only those who serve the public’s interest. As it is practiced, though, retrospective voting is a flawed and even counterproductive method of candidate evaluation. Those voters who do make cognitive connections from the past (objective macroeconomic indicators, personal economic experiences, and other perceived indicators of incumbent performance) in their voting choices often make faulty and unreliable linkages. Retrospective voters often misjudge short-term impacts, misplace responsibility for those outcomes, and overlook longterm impacts. As a result, these voters routinely misjudge incumbents’ ability and willingness to represent their interests in office. Candidate selection errors are even more likely when retrospective voting based on incumbent performance becomes “a choice for or against the incumbent” without regard to the challenger.25 If a voter knows nothing of the challenger in a race, simply “throwing out the bum” becomes a dangerous gamble. IDEOLOGY, PARTISANSHIP, AND COGNITIVE SHORTCUTS

To move beyond such simplistic candidate selection methods, some American voters turn to ideology. A small portion of the electorate evaluates candidates through indirect sources of information about their policy views. For example, a sophisticated voter might know that the Center for Tax Responsibility shares his or her views on public spending. The voter can then evaluate an incumbent based upon the rating that the center gives to that representative’s voting record. Though the voter still does not know the incumbent’s voting record, the voter may infer with confidence that a high rating of the incumbent by the center signals that the representative acted in sync with the voter’s own policy preferences. Such inferences are quite logical, and an ideologically self-aware voter familiar with a political organization’s rating system has as good a chance as any of making sensible candidate evaluations. When such voters have adequate information and a viable opponent to consider, their behavior comes close to the ideal presented in chapter 2. If a representative’s constituents have a clear ideological bent and obtain solid information about all candidates, these voters have the potential for successful electoral rejection of incumbents who stray too far from their ideologically defined interests. That threat, in turn, might win such a constituency sound representation in government. Such a combination of factors is rare, however. Even when there are alternative candidates to consider, limited political sophistication, low

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motivation, and citizens’ self-doubt about their abilities and influence lead the vast majority of voters to make inadequate candidate evaluations, if any at all. Those who choose to vote use more radical “cognitive shortcuts” to translate small amounts of information (of uncertain accuracy) into final judgments. Samuel Popkin, a polling consultant and public opinion scholar, has examined these short cuts carefully in relation to presidential campaigns. One of the most commonly used metaphors for such thinking is the Drunkard’s Search: when a drunken man stumbles outside of a bar at midnight and drops his keys, he drags himself over to the streetlight to look for them; the keys probably fell elsewhere, but he can only see the pavement that’s under the light. Thus, rather than trying to piece together all the information they have obtained, voters make judgments based on the one or two pieces of information in which they have some confidence. Popkin stresses the importance of personal information in a presidential race, but the metaphor works equally well for other salient facts that a voter might glean from an election—or even from the ballot itself.26 Many political observers argue that one particular fact—a candidate’s party—is enough information to make an informed choice about which candidate will best represent a voter’s interests. Though relatively few voters have strong ideological orientations, as many as three-quarters of the electorate identify with either the Democratic or the Republican Party. For example, in the 1998 House elections, 73 percent of voters described themselves as either Democrats or Republicans. Eightynine percent of Democratic voters backed Democrats, and 91 percent of Republican voters backed Republicans. Nonaligned voters, by contrast, split their vote almost evenly between the two parties. Statistics for House elections from 1980 to 1996 show a consistent pattern of from 77 to 92 percent of partisans voting for their party’s candidate.27 Numerous other studies have found that political partisanship is the most powerful predictor of voting choices in a wide range of partisan general elections in the United States. For example, voter partisanship predicts roughly 50 percent of all voting in the presidential election.28 Highly sophisticated partisans sometimes even use party-identification cues in nonpartisan elections by reading party “voting guides” or “candidate slates.” Nonetheless, both the prevalence and value of partisan voting cues are overestimated. After having chosen to vote Republican, for example, voters are more likely to identify themselves as Republican in response

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to an exit poll. Moreover, some voters’ party identities and voting choices match only coincidentally; they may cast their votes and adopt a party identity based on the individual characteristics of the candidate.29 Even if voters were to choose at random between Democrats and Republicans, half of all partisans would support candidates of their own party anyway. Finally, citizens who do not vote in congressional elections (if in any elections at all) have weaker partisan loyalties. Focusing on the partisanship of likely voters is, therefore, misleading. In any case, there is considerable evidence that the power of the partisan cue is declining. After studying the past forty years of party politics in the United States, Martin Wattenberg concluded, “Once central and guiding forces in American electoral behavior, the parties are currently perceived with almost complete indifference by a large proportion of the population.” Consistent with this view, surveys conducted in 1994, 1996, and 1997 have found that between two-thirds and threequarters of Americans report that they regularly vote for candidates of parties other than their own in at least one race per election.30 Table 1 shows, however, that over the past quarter-century, strong partisans of the two major parties have never made up more than a third of the voting-age population. The table also shows that the percentage of partisans in the general population has changed little during that same period. Some observers have argued that despite the scarcity of self-identified party loyalists, independents are actually far more rare. In this view, “pure independents” make up only 10–15 percent of the electorate, because most independents actually “lean” toward one of the two major parties. Self-reported voting data from 1962 to 1990 show that these “leaners” were no less partisan than “weak” Democrats and Republicans. When viewed from another standpoint, however, it is just as noteworthy that over one-quarter of “weak” partisans vote against their party in U.S. House elections. Whether this makes the weak partisans independent or the leaning independents partisan is a definitional question. The fact remains that only a fraction of the electorate consistently vote for just one party.31 One example of the decline of political party identification is the case of Maine, which some political observers view as a bellwether state. In the 1998 election, the Democratic Party campaigned vigorously in the gubernatorial election, but not with an eye toward recapturing the governor’s seat. Late polls showed the Democratic candidate, Tom Connolly, with just 6 percent of the vote, well behind the Republican candidate and the independent incumbent, Governor Angus King Jr. As the

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table 1 percentage of voting-age u.s. citizens with a strong party identification, 1972–1994

1972 1980 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994

Strong Democrat (%)

Strong Republican (%)

Total Strong Partisans (%)

15 18 17 18 18 20 18 15

10 9 12 11 14 10 11 16

25 27 29 29 32 30 29 31

source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 461, based on surveys conducted by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

New York Times explained prior to election day, “If Mr. Connolly does not pull at least 5 percent of the vote on Nov. 3, under Maine law the party will lose its official recognition,” and it “would not be able to hold a primary and officially nominate candidates” in the year 2000.32 In the end, the Democrats got 12 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial election, while the Republicans managed to win only 19 percent. Maine’s successful independent governor has inspired candidates and voters in other states to abandon the major parties. The most surprising example of this influence was the successful 1998 campaign of the wrestler-turned-governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura in the historically liberal state of Minnesota. In a three-way open-seat race against nondescript Republican and Democratic challengers, Ventura persuaded just over a third of Minnesotans to support his Reform Party candidacy. The Minnesota electorate that supported Ventura did not do so because of his political party per se. Rather, voters largely ignored his Reform Party affiliation and embraced him because his personal history, campaign style, and rhetoric were so different from those of traditional Democrats and Republicans.33 Not only is support for the two major parties declining, but partisanship is also most common among those voters who are the most knowledgeable and ideological. Strong Democrats are the most liberal voters, while strong Republicans are the most conservative, and this relationship is even stronger for those voters with the most political

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knowledge.34 For example, a national survey found that only 32 percent of partisans successfully distinguished the two major parties’ positions on four out of four major policy issues. The 37 percent of partisans who distinguished the parties on only one or none gain less information from a candidate’s party membership because they are not entirely sure what such membership implies.35 Since the most knowledgeable voters are the only ones who often make sophisticated ideological judgments about candidates, partisan voting cues are most readily available for those voters who need them the least. Making matters worse, those less sophisticated voters who rely upon partisan cues are more likely to have incidental party affiliations. For most Americans, political party membership is not a “fundamental belief . . . but rather an inherited trait.”36 When a person votes for Democrats because his or her parents voted for Democrats, that voting pattern represents the person’s actual concerns only to the extent that child and parent share similar values, circumstances, and knowledge. Historical party realignments, such as the African-American shift toward the Democratic Party during the Civil Rights era, show that people can change party membership in response to changing party platforms or shifts in voters’ own attitudes. Nonetheless, party identity remains stable for most Americans regardless of changing personal and political circumstances.37 Party membership influences other attitudes and candidate evaluations far more often than these beliefs influence membership.38 Even if a large proportion of the electorate do rely on partisan cues when making voting choices, this dependence is often counterproductive. Recalling the general model of representative democracy in chapter 2, one of the primary purposes of elections is to give an electorate the opportunity to reject an incumbent who has failed to represent its interests. When voters base reelection decisions entirely on the candidates’ party membership, they necessarily overlook other information about the incumbent and challenger. Though publicly available, an official’s voting record often goes unnoticed. Thus, a congressional district populated by liberal Democrats might consistently reelect a conservative Democrat over a liberal Republican because the former shares the majority’s party identity. More generally, voters’ reliance on partisan cues permits representatives to act against their constituents’ interests. If a single representative consistently deviates from the party line even on roll-call votes, the party may sabotage that particular incumbent’s reelection bid, but if the party as a whole violates its member-

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ship’s interests, such deviation is hard for an individual voter to detect, let alone deter. Aside from egregious violations of voters’ concerns, representatives have considerable latitude so long as partisan voting predominates. “Although cases are known where a single wrong vote led to defeat, it is by no means easy to nail members with their voting records,” notes Gary Jacobson, one of the most prominent congressional scholars.39 The use of “open primaries” worsens the situation by permitting voters to cross party lines in the primary election. In states such as California, primary voters select one candidate from among the entire pool of candidates in each race, and candidates advance to the general election if they win more votes than any other in the same party. Voters can support Democrats in some primary races and Republicans in others, regardless of their own party affiliation. Californians embraced this electoral reform as offering “more choice” in the primaries, but the system can easily be abused to select general election candidates out of sync with their own party. The candidacy of an unopposed Democratic incumbent might, for example, encourage Democratic voters to support the most incompetent or unpopular Republican in the primary. With Republicans divided among a group of candidates, this Democratic voting bloc can thus bring victory in the primary to the worst Republican choice. Alternatively, Democratic activists in a strong Republican district can use this system to support a liberal Republican in the primary, leaving Republican voters with nothing but liberals in the general election.40 When voters use a candidate’s party as a shortcut to evaluation, they risk serious misjudgment, and the open primary makes the risk even greater. A more serious problem with partisan cueing lies in the limited range of parties Americans can choose from today. In most races in the United States, voters must choose either a Democrat or a Republican. In a satire of this situation, the animated television program The Simpsons imagined what would happen if the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 1996 presidential election were actually Kang and Kodos, tentacled space reptiles seeking to conquer Earth. On the eve of election day, Homer Simpson unmasks the aliens before a large crowd assembled on the steps of the nation’s capitol. Unperturbed, one of the aliens explains, “It makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed. Doomed!” In reply to this boast, a bold spectator declares, “Well, I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.” Kang and Kodos writhe and laugh maniacally. “Go ahead,” they retort.

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“Throw your vote away!” In the closing scene, legions of human slaves toil to build a giant ray gun, while an alien administrator bellows, “All hail President Kang!” Though the Democratic and Republican parties often see eye to eye on fundamental economic class issues, they differ in many important respects. Party allegiance is a meaningful choice between the ideological left-to-center and center-to-right, and the party unity displayed in rollcall votes in Congress has increased in recent decades.41 If party identity is becoming more ideologically grounded, as some election scholars claim, this trend would result in more meaningful partisan voting.42 Nonetheless, reliance upon just two parties makes a citizen’s choices extremely narrow. Beyond the factions within parties, there are many ideological identities that cross party lines. The Libertarian Party, the Reform Party, and other independent and multifaceted parties provide other choices, but the reality of winner-take-all elections is that those parties have few opportunities to elect their candidates to public office. Voters can register with and vote for a third party to play the role of spoiler, as the Green Party has done in New Mexico, but taken as a whole, third parties play only a marginal role in U.S. politics.43 In sum, because two choices obscure the real diversity of meaningful viewpoints among which one might otherwise choose, parties only crudely represent Americans’ concerns. The ultimate failing of partisan cue reliance, however, is an inescapable feature of conventional American elections. Simply put, partisan cues are useless in nonpartisan elections and party primaries. When choosing among finalists in a nonpartisan general election, less sophisticated voters usually remain unaware of the candidates’ party loyalties, or the candidates may belong to the same party. Innumerable political observers have declared the party voting cue to be the connection between public preferences and political representation, yet no such connection exists in numerous local and statewide nonpartisan races for judgeships, executive offices, councils, and boards. Though nonpartisan systems are often designed to make local government “less political” and avoid graft and corruption, the net result is the removal of the one cue that most voters rely on to distinguish among competing candidates. For this very reason, many political observers oppose the very concept of nonpartisan elections, let alone changing some local elections from partisan to nonpartisan.44 For the same reason, it turns out that every election suffers from dependence on partisan cues. When two Democrats face off against each

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other for a chance to challenge a Republican incumbent in the general election, partisanship is of no use in judging their relative merits. In this sense, every winner-take-all system using a partisan general election still requires a choice among candidates of the same party in the primary. In districts and locales where the vast majority of residents belong to a single party, overreliance on the partisan cue is particularly hazardous. The domination of one party in the general election means that the outcome of the election is actually determined in that party’s primary election. For that crucial decision, voters must look past party membership for guidance. If most voters have become accustomed to relying on partisan cues to choose candidates, they will lose their bearings in primaries and vote blindly or simply abstain.45 One might counter that political parties manage their own primaries and indirectly ensure that the most representative party member goes on to the general election. The problem with this argument is that it is false. That may have been the case at one time, but incumbents are now stronger than the local parties. Renomination and reelection depend upon the decisions of the incumbent, over whom the party has precious little control.46 “Few congressional candidates find opposition from the local party leaders to be a significant handicap; neither is their support very helpful,” Gary Jacobson observes.47 In other words, party primaries are often critical decisions for voters, yet overreliance on partisan cues makes these choices extremely difficult. In sum, relatively few voters use their ideology as a guide when making voting decisions. Many more voters use partisan cues as a guide to voting. By doing so, they hope to overcome the limitations of their own underdeveloped interests. If a voter decides that the Democratic or Republican Party adequately represents his or her interests, candidate party membership can then be used to guide otherwise complex voting decisions. The use of these cues may be in decline, but partisan voting has limited value, in any case. Strong partisan loyalty can actually obscure poor representation by diverting attention from the actual views of candidates and the performance of incumbents. The limited twoparty system in the United States also makes it difficult to represent diverse public viewpoints in partisan voting. When the diversity of viewpoints on current issues is condensed into a binary choice, many ideas and concerns get lost in the process. Finally, partisan cues are useless in nonpartisan and primary elections. Since election to nearly every office requires winning either a party primary or a nonpartisan election, reliance on party membership as a voting guide is inadequate.

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POLITICAL CONVERSATION AS A PERSONAL SHORTCUT

Despite their drawbacks, partisan cues (and ideological cues) are appealing, because they give voters a way to make seemingly sophisticated choices without tremendous effort. What voters need is a more reliable cognitive shortcut to use during campaigns. If voters banded together into small groups, they might be able to pool their limited knowledge into relatively nuanced judgments. Like-minded citizens could compare their candidate preferences, and citizens with divergent views could consider one another’s viewpoints. Even relatively passive and uninterested voters could use the summary judgments of these localized reference groups to make voting decisions. Such a system of information distribution, deliberation, and collective decision making could not only improve the quality of individual voting choices but also the likelihood of successful collective rejection of unrepresentative elected officials. Many voters do, in fact, make “collective” judgments, whether as a couple, a family, or a group of friends.48 National surveys conducted in 1981 and 1990 found that roughly 70 percent of Americans “often” or at least “sometimes” discuss political matters when they get together with friends.49 One study of voters in the vicinity of Albany, New York, prior to the 1998 presidential election found that 88 percent had discussed the election in the past week. On average, people reported talking about the campaign with seven or eight people during that week.50 The frequency with which spouses, families, and housemates vote together has led many political campaigns to target voters “by household.” When a precinct walker or a telephone survey interviewer learns that one adult in a household is favorable toward a particular candidate, the campaign then attributes that preference to all voters in that residence. Campaigns are wise to aggregate voters within households: families do tend to vote together, because there is tremendous political influence within typical American families.51 Do these social networks of political influence result in more informed candidate evaluations? Perhaps campaign conversations can make what Zaller calls an “unsophisticated” voter into a sophisticated one. Recall that in Zaller’s model of public opinion formation, a sophisticated voter is distinguished by the ability to filter out messages that are contrary to his or her preexisting ideology. Regular political conversations between sophisticated voters and less sophisticated ones permit the latter to substitute a social sieve for a cognitive filter of massmediated messages.52

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Research suggests that this portrait is only half-true. It is certainly the case that much political conversation flows directly from the media: a recent focus-group study found that more than a quarter of all statements in an open-ended discussion had direct or indirect references to both factual news programming and entertainment media. A study of the 1992 Pittsburgh newspaper strike also demonstrates a relationship between mass media coverage of elections and the quantity of political conversation: the strike “limited voters’ exposure to media reports concerning the local U.S. House races, and interpersonal discussion of those elections declined in response.”53 Though conversations do transmit media messages, the interpersonal relay messengers are not necessarily the most sophisticated voters. The most careful modern study of political conversation suggests that the people who most influence their fellow citizens are distinguished, not by their political knowledge and expertise, but rather by their mere interest in politics. Even if the most influential political conversants were politically sophisticated, the value of their influence is questionable, because they are noted only for their ability to filter out ideologically dissimilar views. Political deliberation requires the consideration of alternative views, but research suggests that the most influential discussants are those who accurately understand that their conversation partners share views the same as their own.54 Despite its limitations as a means of reaching sophisticated candidate evaluations and collective electoral action, campaign conversation has at least one redeeming quality. As a modest form of public deliberation, it motivates people to get more involved in elections and, specifically, to take the time to vote.55 At the very least, crude candidate evaluations combined with the act of voting come closer to attempted electoral rejection than the passive act of nonvoting. VOTER SOPHISTICATION AND ELECTION VISIBILITY

The preceding discussions have demonstrated the different ways in which voters can make candidate evaluations. Whether a voter primarily considers a candidate’s past record, ideological commitments, party membership, or other characteristics depends upon some of the variables presented above, such as the voter’s ideology and party identity, as well as the type of election (nonpartisan, party primary, or partisan). Two more variables play an important role in influencing candidate evaluations. The first consideration is a voter’s political sophistication.

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As defined by Robert Luskin, a person is politically sophisticated “to the extent to which his or her political cognitions are numerous, cut a wide substantive swath, and are highly organized. . . . A political belief system that is particularly large, wide-ranging, and organized is an ideology.”56 The more politically sophisticated a person becomes, the more likely it is that he or she will pay close attention to elections, search out diverse information sources, and critically examine messages received. A highly sophisticated or “politically aware” voter is more able and inclined to think and vote based upon complex information about candidates in an election. Moderately sophisticated voters seek out a modest amount of political information and make some effort to relate it to what they know about political parties and their own interests. The least sophisticated voters only learn about candidates passively, when the candidates reach out to them through television, radio, and other media, and these voters do little to process the information they receive. Using data on political ideology and involvement and the category definitions presented above, roughly a third of voters fall into each of these three categories.57 How a voter of low or high political sophistication evaluates candidates also depends upon the nature of the campaign itself. In particular, elections vary in the overall intensity of candidates’ campaigns and the media coverage of those campaigns. At the high end of the spectrum is the presidential election, to which there is no comparison. Every day for weeks, if not months, voters are pelted in a hailstorm of information and opinion about the presidential candidates. The intensity of the presidential campaign is so great that it saturates the consciousness of even the most reclusive voter, and only a few high-visibility races for governor or the U.S. Senate compare to it in intensity. Because of its importance and stature, the presidential election has attracted the most attention from scholars of voting. The most influential works on voting have studied presidential elections, and this narrow focus may have caused past research to overgeneralize from the one anomalous election to others.58 Campaigns of moderate intensity, such as typical gubernatorial or U.S. Senate elections, cost far less than a presidential race. Spending only a million dollars or so, a candidate can usually make voters aware that an election is taking place with modest television and radio advertising and a professional campaign organization. In a small town, just a few thousand dollars and a large grassroots effort can create a campaign of sufficient visibility that voters know the candidates by name

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when they arrive at the polls or fill out their absentee ballots. Political scientists normally call these “low-information” races because relatively few political messages reach voters.59 But there is a stratum of elections beneath even the so-called “lowinformation” races, and here lie most elections for public office. The vast majority of election research has focused on presidential and congressional elections, but those elections are for only one of the over 80,000 governments across the United States. Most races for office in the 50 state governments are very low-profile, as are the vast majority of elections to office in over 3,000 counties, 19,000 municipalities, 16,000 townships, 14,000 school districts, and over 33,000 other special districts across the United States60 Most voters are hardly aware of these elections and may not even know a single fact about the candidates until they see names and other details on the ballot. In Texas judicial races, for example, roughly four-fifths of voters could not recognize the names of major candidates just minutes after voting. In 1976, because he shared a familiar surname—Yarbrough—with a former senator and gubernatorial candidate, voters unwittingly elected to the Texas Supreme Court a candidate who claimed he “took his instructions from God.”61 The lowest of the low-intensity races even surprise some voters, who proclaim, “I didn’t know there was an election” for the state legislature, county council, municipal judgeship, or school board. As Harry S Truman once remarked about a local elected office in Pittsburgh, “What in the hell’s a prothonotary?”62 Local representatives, as well as the more obscure state elected officials, barely make a blip on the average citizen’s radar. As James Fishkin muses, “I know almost nothing about most of the 200 to 350 people [who represent me], and they certainly know almost nothing of me.”63 Public awareness of these elections is sometimes so low that turnout is under 20 percent or even below 10 percent. Capitalizing on this fact, the Christian Coalition began targeting local elections in 1990 because it knew that a small, activist core could prove decisive in them. Victory required few votes, and “stealth candidates” could win support without voters knowing what special interests they actually represented.64 Table 2 brings together voter sophistication and campaign visibility to demonstrate how candidate evaluation varies depending on these two variables, plus the partisan nature of voters and elections.65 The table identifies the primary evaluation method of different combinations of voters and elections. The four evaluation methods can be summarized as decision-making shortcuts used by voters to select candidates:

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table 2 how a voter’s main candidate evaluation method depends on campaign and voter characteristics Type of voter

Type of election Low-visibility nonpartisan/ primary Low-visibility partisan High-visibility nonpartisan/ primary High-visibility partisan

Independent, unaware voter

Independent, aware voter

Partisan, unaware voter

Partisan, aware voter

Name

Name

Name

Name

Name

Name

Party

Party

Media

Ideology

Media

Ideology

Media

Ideology

Party

Ideology

note: The cells in the body of the table correspond to four evaluation methods: Name Media Party Ideology

vote for the candidate with the more familiar name and positive personal attributions average all free/paid media messages and vote for the candidate with the most positive rating vote for the candidate who shares voter’s party identity average all free/paid media messages produced by like-minded ideological elites and vote for the candidate with the most positive rating

1. Name: If little is known about the candidates, vote for the candidate with the more familiar name. If some positive and negative personal information is known about candidates (e.g., incumbent went to the same school as the voter or dresses poorly), average those considerations and choose the candidate with the best average rating. 2. Media: Average all media messages (e.g., campaign ads, newspaper/television campaign coverage) received and choose the candidate with the best average rating. All messages are treated as being equally credible and relevant. 3. Party: Choose the candidate who shares the same party affiliation as the voter. 4. Ideology: Excluding messages provided by elites with a dissimilar ideology (e.g., ads produced by ideologically dissimilar organizations, endorsements by ideologically dissimilar newspaper editors), average all media messages received and choose the candidate with the best average rating.

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For ease of presentation, table 2 includes a few simplifications. The figure substitutes “awareness” for political sophistication, and it collapses awareness into two categories—unaware and aware. Table 2 also collapses ideological and political sophistication into one variable. Voters with high political awareness are presumed to both attend to political messages and to approach them with a clear ideological orientation. In reality, most voters falling into one category also fall into the other, but a minority of ideologues lack political sophistication and vice versa. For the same reason, campaign intensity is collapsed into two categories—low- and high-visibility. The dividing line between those categories is, roughly, a moderate-intensity congressional election. In a typical low-visibility nonpartisan or primary election, the Name model best describes candidate evaluation. Because they have no party affiliation, independent voters also select candidates using Name in lowvisibility partisan elections. If asked to explain why they voted the way they did, these voters might say they “preferred” their candidate of choice, without any deeper explanation, or they might admit that they simply chose the one candidate whose name they recognized or whose hand they had shaken.66 In a high-visibility election, independent voters with low political awareness use the Media voting method because they receive a significant number of mass media and advertising messages about candidates.67 Low-awareness partisan voters also use the Media evaluation method in high-visibility party primaries and nonpartisan races. Having received some relevant media messages, many of these voters will be able to recall more substantial arguments for and against candidates; some may even be able to mention key candidate actions and use those as a partial basis for voting.68 Party is the primary evaluation method for partisan voters in partisan races, with one exception: partisan voters with high political awareness use their ideological sophistication to filter media messages and identify the optimal candidate.69 Highly aware independent and partisan voters use this Ideology method in every high-visibility election, although true independents have considerable difficulty identifying like-minded ideological elites in highly polarized media environments. Table 2 is a crude summary portrait of candidate evaluation, but it makes clear two of the central points in this chapter. First, only partisan voters with high political awareness use party or ideology to evaluate candidates in three of the four types of elections. If only 20 percent of the public is ideological, and 20 percent of those are independent, roughly 15 percent of the electorate votes using partisan or ideological

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cues for most types of elections. Second, only high-visibility partisan elections trigger ideological or partisan voting for three of the four types of voters. Not only are these elections the exception, but they are nearly all coupled with party primaries in which only a fraction of the electorate makes ideological candidate evaluations. In sum, most voters in most elections are making simplistic candidate evaluations. POWERFUL INCUMBENTS AND SCARCE OPPONENTS The difficulty of successful electoral rejection stems not just from illdefined interests and crude candidate evaluations, but also from the limited pool of candidates requiring evaluation. Imagine that a relatively liberal Republican voter learns from liberal ideological elites that people with liberal values should support Medicare, cuts in defense spending, and a progressive tax system. Having clarified some of her basic policy concerns, this earnest citizen might exercise her voice and ask for these policies from a conservative incumbent who represents her in Congress. Rebuffed by the incumbent, the citizen then prepares to become a voter exercising her right to attempt electoral rejection by studying the candidates opposing her Republican incumbent. This story might end any number of ways, but it is likely that this citizen-voter will end up frustrated by the range of alternative candidates available. In some stories, she is shocked to discover that there is no opponent in the primary or general. Or perhaps the incumbent has only a more conservative opponent in the Republican primary, or the Democratic nominee opposing the incumbent has views resembling those of the incumbent. Or, most likely of all, the Democratic primary election results in an opponent who is neither politically viable nor capable. Even if the voter had, in theory, all of the skills necessary to recognize her (and the larger public’s) genuine interests and to evaluate competing candidates, she may find herself with no real choice. Recall that in chapter 2, a necessary precondition of successful collective rejection of unrepresentative incumbents was the existence of alternatives. In the case of elections, this means that (a) one or more electoral opponents must have a chance of winning the election, (b) opponents’ policy positions must differ from those of the incumbent, and (c) opponents must have at least minimal competence to pursue those policies in office. America has a long-standing tradition of debate and conflict, and its democratic political philosophy and institutions are primarily adversarial in nature.70 Nonetheless, many factors con-

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tribute to a relatively shallow pool of candidates willing to run against incumbents at all levels of government. One reason that potential candidates often decline to oppose an elected official is that they dislike the personal criteria by which candidates are judged. For the highest offices, media coverage of campaigns devotes considerable attention to uncovering the “character” of candidates by scrutinizing their personal lives. Tempting targets, such as Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, have habituated the media to looking for personal weaknesses while covering the candidates in presidential primaries. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been frustrated by the unwillingness of possible candidates to step into the political arena for this reason. Though the media pay scant attention to the personalities and family lives of lower-level candidates, there remains a widespread perception that campaigning for any political office exposes one to inappropriate scrutiny. For similar reasons, fierce negative campaigning also has turned away potential candidates. Citizens contemplating a career in public service cannot help but notice the harsh television ads and mudslinging mailers exchanged by candidates in other races. Though a low-intensity campaign against an incumbent might never prompt such an attack on the challenger, prospective candidates must still weigh the odds that they will be unfairly attacked, or that their past missteps will be broadcast for all to see. Whether running for federal, state, or local office, the fear of becoming the target of a negative campaign makes qualified citizens wary of seeking election.71 But even angelic candidates and thick-skinned sinners avoid running for office because of the long odds of defeating an incumbent. By virtue of their position, elected officials have numerous advantages over challengers. Members of Congress, for instance, can send mail to constituents without charge. They have travel and communication allowances, constant invitations to public events, regular media exposure, a district office, and paid staff.72 Even before a campaign begins, the electorate is normally quite familiar with the incumbent’s name, while unable to recognize that of the challenger. An aggressive campaign can reduce but not remove that advantage. After the 1990 and 1994 House elections, for instance, an average of 91 percent of voters reported having had some contact (from a piece of mail to a handshake) with incumbents, but only 40 percent reported contact with a challenger. Eighteen percent said they had met the incumbent, compared to only 3 percent who had met the challenger.73 Given the frequency with which

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name recognition, vague favorability, and similar superficial considerations influence elections, the sheer visibility of an incumbent is a high hurdle for a challenger to jump. The greatest advantage of incumbency, however, is fund-raising ability. The rising price of seeking the presidency has received considerable attention, but costs are climbing for other offices, as well. A tremendous amount of money has been spent on House and Senate races nationwide for decades, and the cost of election has continued to grow. Candidates for the House and Senate spent $740 million dollars in the 1997–98 two-year election cycle. To make matters worse, Gary Jacobson explains, “a vastly disproportionate share of the growing pot of campaign money has gone to incumbents and candidates for open seats.”74 The average cost of contested races is far more than even those figures would suggest. Some unopposed incumbents initially raise funds to intimidate potential opponents and keep them off the ballot, but once that task has been accomplished, “safe” incumbents raise relatively little money. The bulk of fund-raising and spending occurs in the handful of competitive races across the country. To take an extreme example, in the 1996 race for the lone congressional seat for North Dakota, one of the nation’s least-populated states, with a relatively small economy, the Democratic incumbent, Earl Pomeroy, spent $971,000 defeating the $434,000 campaign of his Republican opponent (55 percent to 43 percent). High-profile competitive races involve much greater sums. When Senator Jesse Helms, the long-time incumbent, fought off the challenge of Harvey Gantt in the 1996 North Carolina Senate election, Helms outspent his opponent by nearly two-toone, even though Gantt spent $8 million.75 The national trend of escalating campaign costs has parallels for most state and local offices as well. In California, for example, it is now common for candidates for the state legislature to spend as much, or even more, than candidates for U.S. Congress in comparable districts. New candidates for the California legislature now need to raise $500,000, or possibly more, to compete against an incumbent. These high stakes for state races led one Los Angeles Times reporter to note that “even back-bench legislators attract $100,000 or more from single sources.”76 In New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the United States, candidates for the state legislature have in the past routinely run for office on budgets under $15,000. In 1996, however, a highly competitive Democratic primary set an ominous precedent, with three can-

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didates spending over $60,000 apiece. Though running for high-profile office usually costs more, the price tag on relatively minor state and local races is getting higher with every election cycle.77 Aside from the daunting fund-raising requirements of an effective challenge, Gary Jacobson notes, the personal financial cost of running has escalated: “The investment of time and energy . . . required to run an all-out campaign is daunting. A serious House candidacy is a fulltime job—with plenty of overtime. Most non-incumbents have to finance the campaign’s start-up costs while forgoing income from their regular work for many months.”78 The high personal and financial cost of campaigning has contributed to the dearth of candidates for public office. Surveying nine congressional districts in Tennessee in 1998, for example, the Associated Press reporter Rachel Zoll identified only one credible challenger. The 1997–98 Tennessee congressional delegation included five Republicans and four Democrats, reflecting the parity between the two parties statewide, and in the 1996 presidential election, President Clinton defeated Robert Dole in Tennessee by just two percentage points. Nonetheless, no Tennessee incumbent has lost reelection to the House since 1974, and the 1998 elections proved no exception. When Zoll asked local analysts to explain the lack of credible challengers, they gave two explanations: the “intensive and intrusive media attention” candidates receive and “the high cost of running.”79 Tennessee is no exception: the number of experienced challengers choosing to run against congressional incumbents has declined from 1950 to 1990.80 What is true for national races is also true in low-profile races. As James MacGregor Burns and his colleagues explain in their survey of state and local elections: “Getting good people to run for office is . . . a challenge. The spiraling cost of campaigns and the advantages enjoyed by incumbents have deterred many good potential candidates. Others are repelled by the nasty and negative tone of recent elections. Unless a democracy produces able citizens who are willing to run for office, it loses its ability to hold incumbents accountable.”81 For these reasons, the opponents that incumbents face in both highand low-profile races usually have serious liabilities. Some lack basic intellectual and political skills, and many more are political extremists. There is no way of preventing unqualified candidates from seeking local, state, and federal offices, but it is striking how often such candidates appear as the only opposition on the ballot. This problem of unchallenged incumbency is by no means new. Just one example among

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many was the candidacy of Tom Metzger as the Democratic nominee in a San Diego County congressional district twenty years ago. Metzger was the Democrats’ standard-bearer because no other candidate dared oppose the incumbent. The Democratic Party gave so little attention to the race that it had failed to notice that Metzger was a neo-Nazi (he later became infamous nationally when he unsuccessfully defended himself against the charge of inciting racial violence in Oregon). Although voters are asked to choose every year between well-qualified and politically distinct candidates, many of these elections turn out to be meaningless, because the challenger cannot compete against the well-funded incumbent. These challengers choose to run against the odds, but precious few ever manage to beat those odds. In partisan races in strong Democratic or Republican districts, challengers cannot overcome the unpopularity of their own party, and in more evenly matched districts, nonpartisan races, and primary elections, the incumbent derives a decisive advantage from name recognition and a larger advertising budget. The dramatic victories of underdog challengers make for good stories because they are the exception, but their occurrence in no way changes the overall pattern of uncompetitive elections. There are situations in which voters have the luxury of choosing among equally qualified and viable candidates. A few incumbents inhabit volatile districts in which every new election is as stressful as the last: the late George Brown represented his southern California district in the House from 1972 to 1999, but he only managed to do so by fighting off one challenger after another. He won his 1996 reelection campaign with 50.5 percent of the vote, and he won with 51 percent in 1994.82 Most competitive races, though, feature no incumbent—either because one lost in the primary or because the incumbent has chosen to retire or run for another office instead. When these “open-seat races” take place in even marginally competitive districts, they often result in aggressive campaigns and even higher levels of candidate spending. For example, after Bill Bradley announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate, two New Jersey congressmen ran against one another in the 1996 general election. The Republican, Dick Zimmer, was pro-choice and moderate on many social issues, but he nonetheless clashed with his Democratic opponent, Robert Torricelli, on many issues. With each of the candidates spending over $8 million, neither had a clear financial edge, and after a hard-fought election, Torricelli won with 53 percent of the vote.83 The central question, however, is whether voters have a realistic

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table 3 reelection rates of house and senate candidates, 1972–1998 Percentage Reelected Main Presidential Candidates

U.S. House of Representatives (%)

U.S. Senate (%)

Nixon–McGovern — Ford–Carter — Carter–Reagan — Reagan–Mondale — Bush–Dukakis — Bush–Clinton–Perot — Clinton–Dole–Perot —

94 88 96 94 91 90 96 98 98 96 88 90 94 98

74 85 64 60 55 93 90 75 85 97 82 92 91 90

Average from 1972 to 1998

94

81

1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998

source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 447. 1998 figures are calculated directly from 1998 election results. The percentages represent the number of incumbents who won both primary and general elections divided by the total number who ran for reelection.

chance of voting out of office an incumbent who is unresponsive to their voices. In open-seat races such as the Torricelli-Zimmer election, voters are selecting among new representatives, rather than judging the adequacy of an official’s previous term in the same office. In this sense, such races are qualitatively different from the incumbent-challenger elections that I focus on throughout this book. Together, these factors result in a very secure incumbency for most public officials. Periodically, there is a public cry of “Throw the bums out!” Ross Perot tried to ride such a wave of protest into the White House in 1992. The reality is that even such elections result in little turnover. In the case of Congress, for example, 88 percent of U.S. representatives and 82 percent of senators won reelection despite the cry for reform and new candidates from “outside the Beltway” (see table 3).84 For the House, reelection rates since 1972 have never been below that mark, though the Senate had a period of turnover following

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Watergate and leading up to the Reagan landslide of 1980. Even including this unusual period, reelection rates stand at an average of 94 percent in the House and 81 percent in the Senate. Whereas in the 1970s, voters “hated Congress but loved their own member,” now “voters hate incumbency but at least tolerate their incumbent.”85 Upon closer inspection, reelection is even more of a certainty than table 3 suggests. A few highly volatile congressional districts across the country account for most of the turnover. Most representatives have even higher probabilities of reelection, with 65–85 percent of House incumbents typically winning with at least 60 percent of the vote—a victory margin of 20 percent or greater. After studying the significance of incumbency in 150 years of congressional races, John Alford and David Brady conclude that “personal incumbency advantage now rivals partisan advantage in its contribution to reelection margins.”86 Beyond the relatively high-profile U.S. House and Senate races, typical state and local incumbents enjoy at least as powerful an inherent advantage over their challengers. Since these low-visibility races do not receive significant media exposure and seldom attract well-funded opposition, these elected officials are often even more secure in their jobs.87 NONVOTING, DISTRUST, AND CIVIC NEGLECT Some might argue that high reelection rates simply reflect the public’s satisfaction with its representatives. Were this the case, one would expect that at least half the population would have very favorable views of local, state, and federal public officials. As suggested in chapter 1, however, public confidence in government is low. Taking a closer look at public trust, table 4 shows that only one in twenty American adults have “a great deal” of confidence in their public officials and political institutions, and roughly one-third have “very little” confidence in them. More qualitative research has also found evidence supporting the claim that the majority of Americans feel “shut out” of government and have come to “hate” the political process.88 Not only is public confidence in representative institutions low, it is in decline. As mentioned in chapter 1, 17 percent of respondents in 1974 had “a great deal of confidence” in Congress, but only 8 percent reported the same view in 1994. Twenty-one percent expressed “hardly any” confidence in Congress in 1974, and 39 percent held this view in 1994. In 1974, 64 percent of respondents agreed that “public officials

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table 4 amount of confidence in public institutions among voting-age u.s. citizens in 1996 Institution Local government Federal government Congress Political organizations, parties

A great deal (%)

Quite a lot (%)

Some (%)

Very little (%)

No answer (%)

5 5 3

26 18 12

43 44 42

23 31 39

2 2 4

4

11

39

43

4

source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 460, based on Gallup survey Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1996).

are not really interested” in the average person’s problems, and that figure had risen to 74 percent by 1994.89 When placed in a broader context, some of this decline in public trust actually may have been healthy. In his history of American public life, Michael Schudson points out that “there can be too much trust as well as too little.” High public trust in the 1950s and 1960s partly “reflected a moment of unusual consensus in American life held together by Cold War paranoia, middle-class complacency, postwar affluence, and the continuing denial of a voice in public life to women and minorities.” Thus, “Some of the skepticism about major institutions today is amply warranted. . . . Then again, some of it seems to express a deeper alienation and aimlessness.”90 This alienation manifests itself in the perception that American elected officials do not represent the public. Reviewing 1995 data introduced in chapter 1, table 5 shows that depending on the words one uses, 60–88 percent of Americans agree that representatives are insincere and unresponsive to the real concerns of the public. Whereas nearly two-thirds of Americans in 1964 agreed that “elections make the government pay a good deal of attention” to the public, only 42 percent held that view in 1996. Or, in more general terms, in 1964, 32 percent agreed that “the government pays a good deal of attention to what people think,” but only 15 percent held that view in 1996.91 It is not so much the political institutions themselves that people distrust—it is the people elected to represent them within those govern-

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table 5 distrust of candidates and public officials, Statement Government leaders tell us what they think will get them elected, not what they are really thinking. Government leaders say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever they want. Politicians work for themselves and their own careers, not the people they represent. The government is run for the benefit of special interests, not to benefit most Americans. Government leaders are out of touch. They don’t know or care about what’s going on in the rest of America.

1995

Strongly Agree (%)

Total Who Agree (%)

61

88

55

79

41

73

37

70

30

60

source: Alan F. Kay, Locating Consensus for Democracy (St. Augustine, Fla.: Americans Talk Issues Foundation, 1998), 2.

mental bodies that bother the average citizen. One national poll making this distinction found that only 24 percent of those surveyed approved of the performance of members of Congress, but 88 percent approved of the institution of Congress, “no matter who is in office”92 Another survey found that 95 percent of Americans agreed that “the American form of government is still the best for us,” and 90 percent disagreed with the statement, “There is not much about our form of government to be proud of.”93 Along with deep public distrust, the number of eligible American citizens who do not vote concerns many political observers. Though many bemoan the “steady decline” in American electoral participation,94 voting in major elections has not changed dramatically in recent decades. The more important point is that turnout remains very low. Table 6 shows that voter turnout in presidential general elections has not declined dramatically since 18- to 21-year olds were given the right to vote prior to the 1972 election. Roughly half of the electorate has voted in each presidential general election for the last seven elections. During the forty years prior to 1972, turnout for the eligible electorate ranged from 51 percent (Truman-Dewey in 1948) to 63 percent (Kennedy-

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table 6 voter turnout in general elections, 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 source:

1972–1998

Main Presidential Candidates

Turnout (%)

Nixon–McGovern — Ford-Carter — Carter-Reagan — Reagan-Mondale — Bush-Dukakis — Bush-Clinton-Perot — Clinton-Dole-Perot —

55 38 54 37 53 40 53 36 50 37 55 39 49 36

Federal Election Commission. Data available at http://www.fec.gov/pages/electpg.htm.

Nixon in 1960). Turnout during nonpresidential general elections has also remained steady at around 37 percent for the past twenty-five years.95 Voting rates for most elections are lower. Even-year general elections usually draw out substantially more voters than do primaries, odd-year general elections, and local and special elections may bring out as little as 10 percent of the electorate. Those who show up on election day also tend to stop voting as they reach the lower-profile races farther down the ballot. This process is called voter “roll-off” or “drop-off.” From 1972 to 1996, for example, there was usually a 3–5 percent drop-off from presidential to House elections nationwide. That means that one in twenty citizens counted as voting did not, in fact, do so in the congressional elections. The drop off for lower races is much more substantial. As an illustration, table 7 shows the extent to which voters in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, “dropped off” as they went down their ballots. For example, 8 percent of those who went to the polls or filled out absentee ballots declined to vote for a state corporation commissioner, and when they got to a state Supreme Court retention election, in which they had the choice of retaining or rejecting a sitting justice, 22 percent declined to vote. Drop-off of this magnitude is common, and uneven drop-off among different voting groups can make the voting population even less representative of the larger population.96

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table 7 voter “drop-off” in the bernalillo county, new mexico, november 1996 general election Public Office U.S. President U.S. Senate U.S. House of Representatives State Corporation Commissioner Court of Appeals, Position 1 Supreme Court (retention vote)

Ballots without a Vote (%) 2 3 4 8 11 22

source: Bernalillo County Clerk. Data available at http://www. bernco.gov/clerk/election.html. note: Offices are listed in the order they appeared on the ballot. To reduce table size, some offices have been omitted. The Supreme Court retention election gave voters the option of voting “for or against” a sitting justice.

What is the source of persistent nonvoting and drop-off among those who do choose to vote? One view is that nonvoting reflects public complacency or approval of government.97 Low public trust and confidence in government, however, suggest that nonvoting reflects frustration and alienation more than complacency and satisfaction. Another view is that nonvoters are engaging in a meaningful form of public protest. For example, the radical activist Erwin Knoll argued that his vote would count the most if he refused to cast it. A willful nonvoter once suggested a more indirect protest to an interviewer: he didn’t vote because he didn’t want to “encourage them.”98 Given the ineffectiveness of this form of protest, it is not surprising that research on nonvoting finds no support for the protest explanation. Together, deep public distrust, nonvoting, limited candidate scrutiny, and even ill-defined public opinion are signs of a growing civic neglect. As explained in chapter 2, when dissatisfied citizens fail to use their vote (and their voice), their inaction constitutes neglect of the system. By declining to register their disapproval, citizens permit poor representation to persist. Even in those cases where public officials do face serious challenges to their incumbency, because of the public’s inattention and superficial candidate evaluation, strategically sound challengers would be mistaken to focus their campaigns on a substantive critique of incumbents’ public records. Genuine policy debate on a complex issue wins few voters during campaigns, which are more commonly characterized by misleading accusations, personal insinuations, and one-sided attacks.99 Exchanges between candidates are more vitri-

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olic than deliberative. The point here is that such behavior is not irrational, but rather an honest attempt by campaigns to tailor their messages to the reality of the American political environment. Reaching apathetic and withdrawn citizens requires the constant repetition of loud and simple messages. Sober dialogue on current issues is a luxury only safe incumbents and unaspiring opponents can afford.100 This pattern of civic neglect, nondeliberative campaigning, and questionable representation has self-reinforcing qualities. As James March and Johan Olsen argue in Democratic Governance, “Political actors act on the basis of identities that are themselves shaped by political institutions and governance.”101 Individuals’ experience of the political process shapes their understanding of themselves, their civic capabilities, and their understanding or “accounts” of the process itself. The electoral process described in this chapter leads voters to conclude, as Murray Edelman argues, that voting is closer to “self-expression” than powerful political action. Repeated lessons in futility are likely to engender a helpless or cynical self-identity as a voter, cause civic skills to atrophy, and lead to even more skeptical beliefs about the value and impact of elections.102 Then, in turn, “voters who are left feeling that they are not represented are very likely to feel alienated and detached, and as nonparticipants they are unwilling to shoulder the sacrifices that may be required to promote the common good.”103 When this detachment leads to nonvoting, it further weakens the effectiveness of elections by making the remaining voting population less representative of the general public.104 When this process is repeated over time, it reinforces some of the very problems that lead to hasty candidate evaluation, distrust, nonvoting, and misrepresentation. To put it mildly, the American electoral process does not appear to be a self-correcting system. Instead, the extreme difficulty of challenging unresponsive elected officials fosters a civic neglect that further erodes the electoral process.

CHAPTER 4

Appraising Radical and Conventional Electoral Reforms If voters look for information about candidates under streetlights, then that is where candidates must campaign, and the only way to improve elections is to add streetlights. Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter

The severity of the problems outlined in chapter 3 has inspired many attempts at reforming elections in the United States. Some of the most radical critics of modern American elections suggest discarding the representative system for a more direct form of democracy, whereas others embrace the principle of representation but find fault with winner-takeall district elections. In this chapter, I briefly discuss these proposals, but I devote more attention to the relatively modest changes that political reformers have already put in place. In the broadest sense, these reforms (and suggested improvements to them) are all in the spirit of Samuel Popkin’s call for adding streetlights to elections so that average voters can make better choices on their ballots. More precisely, this metaphor concerns voters’ ability to see clearly the real abilities and beliefs of the candidates. If political reforms, be they modest or monumental, can help voters tell a sound candidate from an unrepresentative one, then they might open wide the door to effective electoral action. And if voters regularly begin to reject officials who are unresponsive and out of touch with the general public, it may lead to governance that better corresponds with the public’s best interests. Ultimately, that is the criterion by which all electoral reforms must be judged.

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DIRECT DEMOCRACY Critics of representative democracy argue that government serves the public’s interest only when the two become one. In this view, it is too difficult to make representatives accountable for their actions even with periodic elections, and, in any case, the public is capable of governing itself directly. If a democratic system makes all decisions in this way, vote and voice become unnecessary, because the public has no bad representatives to reject or chastise. Instead, citizens deliberate together, then express their views directly through their own votes. If their votes produce policies that undermine the public’s interest, they have no one to blame but themselves. Even when writing in theoretical terms, however, advocates of direct democracy do not go that far. The most influential writer on direct democracy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for direct self-governance in The Social Contract over two hundred years ago. Rousseau maintained that government and its laws can only embody the general will if they come directly from the governed. Rousseau envisioned face-to-face assemblies of citizens as the ideal form of democratic deliberation and policymaking, but he reluctantly recognized the limits of this vision. “It is impossible to imagine,” he wrote, “that the people should remain in perpetual assembly to attend to public affairs.” Thus, even Rousseau recognized that a direct system of democracy would have some measure of representation, although the public might be divided into small electorates that maintained an intimate relationship with their representatives.1 One of the most recent proposals for a such a system came from Frank Bryan, a University of Vermont political science professor, and John McClaughry, a Vermont state senator. In The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989) these authors outline a system that places the greatest amount of political power in the hands of local shires made up of 10,000 people in five to ten towns. In this vision of democracy, citizens would make most of the important decisions of their lives within these shires. True direct democracy would take place in small town meetings, and these face-to-face assemblies would also elect the most powerful local representatives. State government would have relatively little power, and its primary role would be channeling funds to the shires and providing them with technical assistance on matters of policy. Relatively few decisions would be made at state and federal levels, and shires would even have ways of playing a direct role in the nation’s foreign policy.

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Kevin O’Leary suggests another means by which large-scale institutions can be brought down to the community level. He proposes that every congressional district in the United States should have a legislative assembly, representing fifty subdistricts. The 435 such assemblies across the country “would have the duties of helping to set the legislative agenda and . . . deliberating and voting on bills that have passed the House.” In effect, a bill that made it through Congress would then have one more stop before reaching the president. If deemed sufficiently important by the joint executive committee overseeing the network of assemblies, each local body would deliberate and vote on a bill, and their votes would be decisive.2 Local legislative assemblies would not be a form of direct democracy per se. They would make federal government more local, however, and because of the small size of the local assemblies, the process appears closer to the ideal of direct democracy than the present system. Because they would constitute yet another layer of representation, the assemblies would nevertheless suffer some from of the problems detailed in chapter 3. In effect, the proposal creates another layer of government but does not fundamentally change the process by which average voters select and influence representatives. No doubt the assemblies would give even greater influence to their most active constituents, but that would further increase the influence of the most influential. John Burnheim has proposed a different system of direct government. Like the Vermont shire system, Burnheim’s “demarchy” shifts considerable power away from federal and state governments to local authorities. Demarchy decentralizes power not only vertically but also horizontally: whereas the shire system would have powerful local governments to manage the business of each town and shire, demarchy splits up those local powers for each major public function. The local transportation bureau and the hospital board, for example, would govern themselves separately. Moreover, the public officials who managed these agencies would not be elected; instead, a random lottery would periodically select representatives from among the citizens who used each public good.3 The idea of direct legislation has become popular in many countries, however, and it is, in some ways, practiced in the United States. Many states permit citizen-sponsored referenda and initiatives. Through an initiative, voters can propose a legislative measure or a constitutional amendment by obtaining the required number of signatures on a petition. A referendum gives voters the chance to approve or reject a pol-

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icy normally referred to the electorate by the state government. In a review of the history of referenda and initiatives in the United States, Thomas Cronin found that “voters have been cautious and have almost always rejected extreme proposals” that have appeared on their ballots. Among other accomplishments, voters have used the initiative process to promote women’s suffrage, remove poll taxes, establish presidential primaries, and enact sunshine laws to ensure open public meetings.4 Over the years, referenda have also become very popular, with 80 percent of Americans even supporting “a national referendum system in which all citizens voted on proposals that deal with major national issues.”5 Unfortunately, referenda and initiative elections suffer from the same maladies that plague elections for public office. For instance, surveys have found that “as many as one-third to a majority of those voting” report feeling “uncomfortable about voting because they needed more information or more time to discuss the issue or to read the voter pamphlet more carefully, or found that the statement was too hard to read and comprehend.”6 When an initiative on the ballot receives little notice, voters may have nothing to base their vote upon other than the confusing wording of the initiative itself. In relatively high-visibility referendum elections, such as the recent votes on affirmative action and the civil rights of homosexuals in Western states, average voters are likely to have much more information, although much of it may be misleading, deceptive, or simply inaccurate.7 For these elections to work properly, they would have to be far more deliberative in character, and chapter 7 suggests a way in which states might improve the initiative and referenda processes. Even when initiative elections work properly, however, they do not provide a substitute for representative government. They can complement indirect democracy with periodic opportunities for direct citizen involvement in policy decision making, but few consider the initiative process a practical method for conducting all of the public’s legislative business. This reality brings back into focus the difficulty of ensuring effective electoral relief from bad representation, and the remainder of this chapter examines different proposals for meeting that challenge. ALTERNATIVE VOTING SYSTEMS Democratic reformers committed to representative government find fault, not with the notion of representation, but with aspects of particular

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election systems. The strongest of these criticisms question the basic design of most federal, state, and local elections in the United States. The American system relies upon “winner-take-all” contests in single-member districts. Candidates run in party primaries or multicandidate nonpartisan primaries, and the winners in these primaries compete in the general election, with the top vote-getter winning the contested public office. Minor variations include multiseat contests, such as a school board race with five candidates running for three seats, multiple seats within the same districts or only at-large seats with no districts, and judicial retention elections in which a judge runs against the “No” vote to keep the seat he or she already holds. In all of these elections, the design is basically the same: voters cast one vote for each seat, and individual candidates win if they get the most votes. CUMULATIVE AND PREFERENTIAL VOTING

Even modest changes in this basic design can sound shocking to Americans, although such variations are usually designed to ensure more political equality. When President Clinton nominated Lani Guinier for the position of assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, Republicans (and some Democrats) vilified her for supporting alternative voting systems. Guinier’s critics decried her views on civil rights and elections as “anti-democratic” and dubbed her the “Quota Queen.” Just a month after naming her, Clinton withdrew her nomination, with the explanation that he had reread her writings and disagreed with her views. What had Guinier advocated that caused a political battle and cost her the nomination? With regard to representative government, Guinier had endorsed a system called cumulative voting. As she described it, “Under cumulative voting, voters get the same number of votes as there are seats or options to vote for, and they can then distribute their votes in any combination to reflect their preferences. Like-minded voters can vote as a solid bloc or, instead, form strategic. . . . coalitions to gain mutual benefits.”8 The advantage of such a system is that it ensures significant minorities some representation in government bodies. In a winner-take-all system, a subgroup of the public might cast one-third of the votes yet never win an election. Cumulative voting reduces the likelihood of creating a permanent minority by permitting voters to cast all of their votes for one candidate instead of requiring those votes to be spread across separate races for each seat. Guinier gives the example of

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Chilton County, Alabama, which simultaneously elects all of its school board and county commission seats. In that county, Guinier explains, “Any group with the solid support of one-eighth the voting population cannot be denied representation . . . because any self-identified minority can plump or cumulate all its votes for one candidate.” A handful of other counties and cities, as well as some corporations, use the cumulative voting method, and political, ideological, and demographic minorities have used the system to ensure themselves vocal representatives on governing bodies.9 Other deviations from the winner-take-all model are common outside the United States. Preferential voting is practiced in the Irish Parliament, the Australian Senate, and even on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, city council. This system also has candidates run for several seats at once, but rather than voting multiple times, each voter picks a firstchoice candidate, a second choice, and so on. If a candidate receives more first-choice votes than are needed to win a seat, those surplus votes (chosen at random) get transferred to the backers’ second choices. Also, the candidate with the fewest votes has his or her backers’ ballots all transferred to their second choices. This process is then repeated, looking for any candidates who have enough first- or second-choice votes to win a seat, and so on. In practice, roughly seven in eight voters end up backing a winning candidate.10 Again, the point of such a system is to ensure that voters are represented. Cumulative and preferential voting both have the virtue of empowering small blocs of voters. Nevertheless, these systems do not address the basic problem underlying ineffective electoral competition against unrepresentative incumbents. They provide no deliberative process whereby voters formulate their interests more clearly (other than perhaps a vague identity as a minority voting bloc), and they do not aid voters in making systematic candidate evaluations. Moreover, these systems might not even make use of those interests. By making electoral victory possible for candidates supported by less than a full majority, these systems might invite some new candidates into the electoral process, but money and personality would continue to play powerful roles in elections. UNIVERSAL REPRESENTATION

In their book Reinventing Congress for the Twenty-First Century, Sol Erdman and Lawrence Susskind argue that party politics and

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geographic districting are the direct causes of political stagnation and poor policymaking, particularly in the U.S. Congress: Since each member of Congress is elected by a majority vote of citizens whose political priorities directly conflict, most legislators shy away from dealing with real priorities. Instead, they try to represent some simplistic common denominators that the majority of local voters might accept— whether or not these commonalties have substance or coherence. Thus, one legislator defends his district’s obsolete arms factory, although it harms the economy and security of the world his constituents inhabit. Another advocates less government and a balanced budget, but without any reduction in locally popular programs.11

They propose that the U.S. House of Representatives switch to a system of “universal representation.” In this system, a large pool of candidates run for the House, and each voter selects a first-choice candidate, a second choice, and so on. Once all the ballots are collected, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is dropped, and the votes are transferred to those voters’ second-choice candidates. This process of elimination continues until 250 candidates remain. In a follow-up election, each of the 10–15 percent of voters who had none of their choices elected would get to vote again and select one among the remaining 250 candidates. Finally, each of the 250 representatives receives a “voting strength” proportionate to the number of citizens who voted for him or her. In a way, this system is proportional representation, except that voters cast their ballots for specific individuals rather than political parties. Erdman and Susskind argue that universal representation would give even greater power to minorities and ensure more public accountability than do other electoral systems. “Since universal voters would have many choices of candidates,” they argue, “representatives would feel far greater pressure than they do now to address the priorities of their constituents. . . . Congressmen and women would have voters at their backs [and] scores of challengers on the sidelines.”12 By creating a likeminded constituency for each representative, elected officials would have less difficulty knowing and representing the interests of their constituents. Erdman and Susskind’s system has other important features, such as streamlined information transmission to help voters learn about candidates and public financing for voter education and some forms of campaigning. They imagine that the most highly motivated voters would spend several hours, or even days, evaluating the list of congressional

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candidates, which could number in the thousands. At the same time, they recognize the existence of some lazy (i.e., less sophisticated) voters and suggest that those could send a standardized issues questionnaire to the election commission clearinghouse “and let its computer select candidates” by matching the voters’ policy priorities with candidates’ stated agendas.13 Would this system result in a better pool of candidates, more selfaware voters, and better candidate evaluations? Would representatives who failed to represent the interests of their backers face quick electoral defeat under it? It is hard to guess exactly how such a system would function and whether it might transform the values, skills, and habits of the electorate. Because it links representatives to substantive voter preferences, rather than parties or geographic districts, it might inspire voters to deliberate upon their own views and to choose a representative carefully. Unless the implementation of the system transforms the political process itself, however, it is likely that like cumulative and preferential voting, universal representation will not serve the interests of most of those citizens who either do not vote or vote based on inadequate candidate evaluations. The systems complicate the act of voting considerably, and that makes informed voting even more difficult. Moreover, the questionnaire-matching method of voting in Erdman and Susskind’s system could make it even harder to defeat incumbents who failed to represent the public’s genuine interests. Depending on its structure, the survey questionnaire would probably institutionalize nondeliberative opinions rather than promoting more deliberative policy judgments and voting decisions. Also, so long as lazy voters’ questionnaire responses remained stable, the voters would continue to elect candidates who gave matching answers, regardless of their actual actions as elected officials. The computer might try matching voter questionnaires with the actual votes cast by public officials, but who would program it to judge the implications of those policy votes? PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION BY PARTIES

Regardless of the voting system, the less sophisticated voter must have a way to make an intelligent vote, because such voters exist in abundance in all large-scale quasi-democratic political systems. Most countries address this problem by simplifying rather than complicating voters’ electoral decisions through the party-list form of proportional

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representation (PR). In this system, voters simply choose a party, rather than a candidate, and all of the seats for a governing body are filled simultaneously by giving parties seats in proportion to the number of votes they received, as long as the party earned at least a minimum percentage of the total vote. Through internal processes, the parties then assign individuals to the seats they have won. Relative to the winner-takes-all system, PR has the advantage of electing public officials sympathetic to minority interests. In the United States, even when the supporters of a third political party are numerous, their geographic dispersion is likely to ensure their electoral defeat in every district. Under a PR system, such parties would win seats in proportion to the size of their memberships. If 5 percent of Americans strongly identified with the Libertarian Party and voted accordingly in a congressional election using the PR system, 5 percent of the members of the House of Representatives would be Libertarians. The other voting methods described earlier have this same advantage of minority representation, but the PR system is much simpler.14 Does proportional representation ensure effective electoral action? The answer to that question is complicated by the fact that voters do not elect individual representatives in the party-list version of PR. Voters shift allegiances to new parties, not new candidates, so the electorate evaluates entire parties, not candidates. Presumably, voters can better match their interests with a party platform than with individual candidates, and it may even be easier to track and evaluate the performance of a party in parliament than that of an individual representative. If a party is part of a majority coalition in a PR system, for instance, a voter can easily judge whether it has made environmental remediation a top priority. By contrast, because of the limited power of individual representatives in the present U.S. system, voters might mistake legislative failure for a lack of effort or interest on the part of a well-meaning representative. The PR system also aids collective rejection of unrepresentative incumbents by making a single voter more powerful: for an elected body with 400 members, if only one-quarter of 1 percent of the electorate shifts allegiance away from an unrepresentative party, that party loses a seat. In the United States, a change in representation requires a sufficient number of disenchanted voters to move an incumbent’s vote total below that of at least one challenger, and that can require a synchronized shift of 10 or even 30 percent of the vote.

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MODEST ELECTORAL REFORMS All of these systems, however, suffer from a problem of circumstance in addition to any errors in design. As Lani Guinier’s experience demonstrated, major departures from the winner-take-all voting system can frighten or even enrage many Americans. Though a dispassionate discussion of these systems might win them more support, Americans have become attached to the notion of district representatives. Over time, the winner-take-all district system has become a tradition, and a wholesale departure from that system is unlikely in the near future. Thus, many electoral reformers have turned their attention to making changes within the basic framework of the existing system. In the remainder of this chapter, I review suggested changes in the number of terms an incumbent can hold office, the way campaigns are financed, how candidates present themselves during elections, and what information citizens obtain before voting. LIMITING TERMS IN OFFICE

Perhaps the simplest reform proposed in recent decades is term limits. Advocates of term limits have argued that the failures of American government stem from long-term incumbency. As discussed in chapter 3, incumbents have tremendous advantages over challengers both by virtue of their office and because of the fund-raising ability that their office affords them. Elected officials grow dependent on campaign contributions, which ensure reelection, and consciously or not, they begin to represent the interests of contributors rather than those of their constituents. According to term-limits proponents, if elected officials were limited to a finite number of terms in office, they would be out of office before they lost touch with the general public. Whenever an official reached his or her term limit, the next election would be guaranteed to bring into office a new representative.15 The simplicity of their design and their indisputable ability to remove incumbents from office has made proposals for term limits popular across the country. Public opinion is quite favorable toward term limits, and more than half of the states in the United States have set limits for the number of terms that their state legislators can remain in office.16 Under these laws, elected officials can hold seats for only six to twelve years, although many individuals have found that they can successfully leap from one body to the other (in roughly the same geographic district) to double the length of their political careers.17

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The term-limits approach to reform has various drawbacks. A 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that congressional term limits would require a constitutional amendment, so this approach will be difficult to extend above the state level. Aside from this barrier, term limits inevitably result in a decline in the average experience and skill of lawmakers. When grappling with the minutiae of complex policy debates, such inexperience may foster dependence on permanent (and unelected) legislative staff, as well as on seasoned lobbyists. Prior experience does not necessarily improve an elected official’s moral judgment, but it does prove useful when crafting legislation and navigating the legislative process. In a few years, states will be able to take stock of the impact of term limits and better understand their impact on legislative competence. The more serious problem with limiting terms is that this reform does not directly address the central problems introduced in the first chapter. In essence, the term-limits approach gives up on the problem of effective electoral rejection of unresponsive incumbents.18 Instead of making incumbents accountable or even just vulnerable, this reform removes them altogether after just a few years in office. Elected officials are removed from office by time, rather than public protest. Framed in the model presented in chapter 2, a system of severe term limits admits that citizen vote and voice are powerless, and to avoid a downward spiral into civic neglect, the system instead gives citizens periodic competitive elections between new candidates. When viewed in these terms, it is clear that the term-limits proposal is far from an automatic fix for the problems of low public trust and questionable representation. Term limits only remove long-term incumbency from the list of possible causes. To succeed, term limits would have to do more: they would have to transform the nature of campaigns, such that victors are more representative of the public’s deliberative interests and citizens come to recognize and appreciate their improved representation. Even advocates of term limits do not claim such farreaching effects.19 Proponents hope that term limits will restore public trust in government, but the successful enactment of term limits in numerous states has done nothing to halt the decline in public confidence.20 CHANGING THE ROLE OF MONEY

Other reformers have focused more closely on the role of money in American political campaigns. As illustrated in chapter 3, elections have become increasingly expensive. From 1972 to 1974, contributions

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to House candidates increased an average of 8 percent in real dollars per two-year election cycle. Contributions to U.S. Senate candidates grew 12 percent every two years.21 As Larry Makinson of the Center for Responsive Politics writes: “Elections these days are big business. . . . To win a seat in a state legislature, a big city council or the U.S. Congress . . . takes not only an attractive candidate, but a good organization and plenty of advertising. And that takes money.”22 Chapter 3 showed that dependence upon money has a powerful effect upon who can run for office. Candidates without sufficient personal funds or considerable backing by major donors rarely have any chance of victory and—unless idealistic, self-promotional, or delusional—choose not to run for office. Those serious candidates who do run for office, with the exception of some independently wealthy individuals, also alter their behavior during campaigns because of their dependence on major donors. Candidates spend long hours trying to raise funds, and that fund-raising takes time away from contacting voters. Rather than meeting with citizens and considering their interests, many candidates spend more time meeting with potential contributors and modifying their policy positions or priorities to win contributions. The logic behind this behavior is simple: in one well-scheduled hour, a candidate for U.S. Congress might be able to earn ten or twenty votes through direct contact with undecided voters at a meeting, at their doors, or on the phone. Meeting or talking with donors, however, a candidate might be able to raise enough money to buy advertising that sways hundreds of votes. Since the candidate’s opponent generally takes the latter approach, a candidate who relies upon direct contacts rarely wins in such elections. As even the most local races become more media-savvy and cable television facilitates advertising to narrower geographic and demographic target audiences, the incentives for larger budgets (and more fund-raising) increase even in small-scale elections.23 To encourage more contact with voters and less fund-raising, some political reformers have argued for public financing for all major elections. The idea of taxpayer money replacing political action committee and individual contributions is not decidedly un-American: presidential campaigns are funded, in part, by citizens who voluntarily check a box on their federal income tax forms. Advocates of public financing argue that virtually all other elections would benefit from full or partial government funding. Survey data suggest that, depending on the design of the system, the electorate might support such an idea. For instance, a 1996 Gallup poll of likely voters found that 64 percent favored a

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proposal for the federal government to provide “a fixed amount of money for the election campaigns of candidates for Congress, and that all private contributions be prohibited.”24 A 1997 Gallup poll found that support dropped to 43 percent, however, if in conjunction with public financing, “all contributions from individuals and private groups are banned.”25 After the 1998 election, Arizona and Massachusetts joined Maine and Vermont as states where voters have endorsed some form of voluntary public financing for candidates who accept various campaign financing restrictions. More modest proposals, some of which have become state or local law, recommend that the state provide matching funds and other perks to candidates who conform to strict campaign financing guidelines. In a Washington Post opinion piece, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein argue for a system that encourages small in-state donations in U.S. House and Senate elections. Under this plan, a federal fund would match any in-state individual contribution of $100 or less by placing a 10 percent tax on all contributions over $500. Candidates who followed these rules and obtained sufficient small in-state donations would then receive free air time, “contingent on the candidates themselves delivering the messages.”26 Pushing candidates toward small contributions, however, may simply result in different fund-raising strategies by candidates and more independent expenditures by political action committees and other interest groups, which are difficult to regulate effectively and constitutionally. Paradoxically, limited public financing or systems that make it more difficult to amass campaign contributions could have the perverse effect of making campaigns less competitive. A study of U.S. House and Senate campaigns from 1978 to 1994 found that “the critical financial determinant of election outcome is not how much the top spender invests in a campaign, but whether the other serious candidates have sufficient funds to get their message to the voters.” In 1994, the average budget of winning House candidates was $738,117, but most proposed spending caps are much lower. In this view, incumbents start with large advantages based on public visibility, constituent service, and campaign experience, so challengers need to be able to raise as much money as possible to reach voters.27 One more approach to campaign finance reform tries to reduce fund-raising pressure by providing candidates with the most expensive campaign resource—air time. The League of Women Voters Education Fund, along with groups as diverse as the conservative American En-

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terprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institution endorse a proposal for a “broadcast bank” of roughly $500 million (indexed for inflation) in advertising vouchers. In their scheme, every television and radio station in the United States would contribute an equal amount of prime air time to a bank, which would then allocate advertising vouchers to individual candidates and political parties, who could use the vouchers in whichever elections they chose. Advertisers would need to follow just two simple rules: each ad would have to air for a minimum of sixty seconds, and for the duration of the commercial, the candidate would have to appear on screen (or his or her voice would have to be heard on radio). The system would put no constraint on further media buys, while providing candidates and parties with a bank roughly the size of the political air time purchased in 1995–96.28 The only sizable obstacle standing in the way of this relatively simple and powerful plan is the amount of profit it would take away from commercial broadcasters, which have thus far successfully resisted the proposal. Even if campaign finance reforms create more competitive races, that would not necessarily change the quality of the decisions that voters make. Just as the term-limits laws enacted in many states create a mandatory but mindless turnover in elected officials, more competitive elections might replace more incumbents, but the reforms do not improve the accuracy with which voters time those replacements. For this reason, a public financing scheme might prove to be nothing more than a rich person’s term limit, which removes incumbents from office through costly elections without promising a superior replacement. IMPROVING CAMPAIGN DISCOURSE

By removing the pressures of fund-raising altogether, full public financing proposals at least have the potential to expand the pool of qualified candidates and increase the percentage of campaign energy devoted to voter contact. Even increases in the quality of candidates and the quantity of voter contacts, though, do not ensure a corresponding increase in voters’ ability to recognize and reject unrepresentative elected officials through campaign deliberation. In the view of some reformers, only direct efforts to improve the deliberative quality of campaigns will solve the collective electoral action problem. If voters receive more high-quality information and watch fewer misleading or confusing campaign ads, the electorate will better understand the candidates and make more informed choices on their ballots.

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Many critics of contemporary campaign discourse point to the prominent role of negative ads. In the American political vernacular, a negative ad is any written or broadcast campaign advertisement that criticizes an action or quality of an opponent. A negative ad might remind voters that an incumbent voted for a tax increase, or an attack ad could focus on the criminal background of a candidate’s family. The purpose of negative ads is to win elections by winning over undecided voters, persuading an opponent’s supporters to switch allegiance, or causing undecided or opposing voters not to vote.29 There has been some debate about the third of these effects, but both experimental and field studies of attack ads show that such advertising often results in a modest (5 percent) drop in voting for a given election.30 More refined critiques of campaign discourse distinguish between substantive criticisms and illegitimate attacks. One form of illegitimate attack is the outright falsehood or misleading statement. Some mass media responded to these ads in the 1990 election by reporting on the ads themselves. This “adwatch” approach aimed at scrutinizing campaign ads and revealing any false or exaggerated claims that candidates made to voters. Unfortunately, two studies of the adwatch response suggest that it is not always effective: a study of a 1992 Pat Buchanan attack ad on President George Bush found that viewing an adwatch caused voters to discredit the ad somewhat; however, a study of an attack ad in the 1992 North Carolina gubernatorial campaign found that by rebroadcasting the negative ad, the adwatch format can enhance the intended effect of the ad.31 A more extreme response is to ban or prohibit all misleading ads, whether they be on the attack or on the defensive. In the 1998 Ohio gubernatorial race, for example, a county judge granted a request by the Democratic candidate, Lee Fisher, to ban a television ad created by his Republican opponent, Bob Taft. Fisher’s request pointed to two statements in Taft’s ad. First, Taft’s ad used a partial quotation from a Cleveland newspaper article explaining that Taft had campaigned in favor of a proposed tax increase on a public ballot but “didn’t raise the taxes himself.” Taft’s ad responded to a Fisher attack by quoting, “Taft didn’t raise the taxes. . . . ” Second, Taft counterattacked by claiming that as a state senator, Fisher had cast the “deciding vote” that raised Ohio’s income tax in 1983. Fisher argued that any senator’s vote for the measure, which passed 17–16, could have been the “deciding” one, which Taft later acknowledged.32

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Notwithstanding that some judges may make rulings such as the Ohio ban on misleading ads, the First Amendment bars such action as an infringement upon free speech, and the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled against any such restriction. The Court’s position is a sound one, because permitting judges to rule on the quality of political discourse invites unwarranted censorship and unduly politicizes the judicial branch. In the Ohio case, the defendant responded to the ruling by attacking the judge’s neutrality (the judge had contributed $125 to the plaintiff’s campaign). In this way, the main consequence of involving judges in partisan contests may be to undermine the legitimacy of the judiciary. A more modest approach to unruly and manipulative campaign discourse is to work for voluntary codes of campaign ethics. In 1996, a Maine public library joined with a public policy institute to encourage the state’s ten candidates for federal office to agree to a voluntary Code of Election Ethics. By signing the code, candidates agreed to follow four principles: honesty, respect, responsibility, and compassion. Box 1 shows the full text of the agreement, which combines broad guidelines with specific rules.

Box 1 The Maine Code of Election Ethics, 1996 Honesty and Fairness I shall emphasize my views, beliefs, and experiences. I am committed to an open and public discussion of issues and to presenting my record with sincerity and frankness. I shall not use or agree to let third parties use subtle deceptions, half-truths, falsifications, or such practices as push polling. If such practices are used by third parties without my approval, I shall repudiate it immediately and publicly upon my knowledge of its occurrence. Factual claims made by my campaign will be supported by publicly available documents provided by my campaign office.

Respect I shall avoid demeaning references to my opponent and demeaning visual images of my opponent. I shall respect my opponent. I shall not use or allow to be used personal attacks, innuendo, or stereotyping.

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Responsibility I shall ensure that my campaign staff and campaign supporters will observe these principles of fair campaign practices. I take full responsibility for all advertising created or used on my behalf by staff and supporters. I shall conduct my campaign openly and publicly, discussing the issues as I see them, presenting my record and policies with sincerity and frankness, and criticizing without fear and without malice the record and policies of my opponent and his or her political party that merit such criticism. I will not condone or allow third-party advertising which does not meet the principles contained in this document. If such practices are used by third parties without my approval, I shall repudiate it immediately and publicly upon my knowledge of its occurrence.

Compassion In the conduct of my candidacy, I shall show compassion at all times for my opponent. I shall remember that the campaign process is fundamental to representative democracy and that my behavior in the campaign affects the integrity of our society.

SOURCE :

http://www.campaignconduct.org.

The Maine Code inspired similar efforts, such as the Project on Campaign Conduct, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. With the project’s assistance, the candidates in Washington State’s second congressional district reached agreement on a similar code of conduct. In return, the candidates’ ads can display a logo that depicts the shaking of hands and says, “Honesty, responsibility, fairness” and “Hold us accountable.”33 The advantage of such codes is that they are voluntary, pose no threat to the freedom of political expression, and put pressure on holdouts to agree to reasonable standards for campaign conduct. In this way, they might promote substantive debate on relevant issues, and that would help voters accurately evaluate candidates and make better-informed choices. If they make campaigns more deliberative, they might also attract a higher-quality pool of candidates, many of whom had avoided running for public office because of the unduly hostile climate of past campaigns.34 The weakness of the voluntary codes is the fact that they come with no enforcement. In Maine, for example, many federal candidates returned to vicious attack ads in the final weeks of the campaign despite

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having pledged to refrain from such behavior. As the Ohio Project on Campaign Conduct explains, “rather than establish a formal monitoring process or ‘ethics police,’ we’re encouraging the voters to let the candidates know how they feel about nasty campaigns.”35 Unfortunately, this simply puts another burden on the voters, whose difficulty reaching efficient and sound candidate judgments inspired ethics codes in the first place. GUIDING VOTERS

A different approach is to provide voters with more high-quality information, rather than trying to improve the quality of the messages that the candidates themselves produce. Returning to the epigraph from Samuel Popkin that opens this chapter, “If voters look for information about candidates under streetlights, then . . . the only way to improve elections is to add streetlights.” If civic activists find attack ads distasteful, they can offer voters an alternative source of information about the candidates. In Ohio, for example, voters did not have to rely on the attack ads exchanged by the two leading candidates in the 1998 gubernatorial election. Any voter who visited a public library, the Internet, or any number of coffee shops and public spaces could pick up a copy of the Ohio Voters Guide put out by the League of Women Voters. A quick glance at the fourth page showed voters the candidates’ educational backgrounds, occupations, and relevant professional and voluntary experiences. The candidates also provided written answers to two questions, “How would you increase economic stability for all Ohioans?” and “Do you support a permanent, stable funding source for the House Trust Fund? Why or why not?” Many voters find publications like the Ohio Voters Guide useful. A study of a similar voting guide in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, found that as many as a third of the registered voters in the county at least glanced at the guide before voting.36 For many voters, a League of Women Voters guide is the only readily available source of information in low-intensity elections, such as those for state legislature or district judge. Poll workers often see voters walk into the voting booth clutching a printed guide, and those voters may read as they vote or refer back to selections they have already marked in their guides.37 Though voting guides can be helpful, they often contain vague or distorted information. The Ohio questions mentioned above illustrate two

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basic problems. The first question is too vague, permitting both Republican and Democratic candidates to make statements such as, “Every child must graduate with basic reading and writing skills.” The second question is specific but noncontroversial; both candidates said they supported affordable housing. Moreover, because the guides rely upon unchallenged candidate statements, they remain subject to misleading or false statements. For this and other reasons, the state of California prints and distributes an official voting guide with state funds. Once candidates submit their statements to the editors of the California Voters Guide, opponents can challenge the statements, and state judges rule on whether those challenges reveal factual inaccuracies. Despite public mistrust of government, the California secretary of state’s office has found that the state-sponsored Guide has considerable influence on California voters. All of them receive it, and as many as one-third read and use it.38 Writing from personal experience, I recall walking door-to-door during one election in San Diego and receiving a puzzled response from a voter when I tried to give her information about a congressional candidate. “Why would I need this?” the voter asked. “I’ll just read the Voters Guide.” (The irony is that congressional races are not, in fact, in the state’s Guide.) No matter what the quality of a guide’s questions and answers, printing costs create space limitations that prevent detailed portraits of all of the candidates running for public office in a major election. On the Internet, no comparable limits exist. Project Vote Smart, the Democracy Network, and many other organizations have produced elaborate websites with several pages of information (and links to other sources of information) on each election. Some of these on-line voting guides permit interactive candidate evaluation: voters can answer a series of questions and compare their responses to candidate answers, just as Erdman and Susskind describe in their vision of universal representation (presented earlier in this chapter). These on-line guides can even provide up-to-the-minute information, including adwatch-style critiques of candidate claims and daily campaign financing updates to reveal any untoward contributions that happen to arrive just before election day.39 Though only a relatively small percentage of voters currently use these on-line guides, as Internet use increases among the general population, they will probably come to play at least as important a role as their paper-and-ink forerunners. These guides will also become more

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popular as their design improves. For example, the printed guides provide voters with a paper document they can bring to the polls or refer to easily while filling out an absentee ballot. An ideal Internet voting guide would permit users to note candidate preferences and other votes as they navigated the site, then print out a marked sample ballot or a one-page summary of voting choices. Finally, some newspapers have begun to change the basic framing— or “master narrative”—of their state and local campaign coverage by deemphasizing attacks and counterattacks and focusing on the real concerns of their readership. As the journalism scholar Jay Rosen explains in the case of the 1992 election coverage provided by the Charlotte Observer, the newspaper “succeeded in changing the master narrative from the story of how the campaign was won to a new story: the story of citizens voicing their concerns, and listening to what candidates said about them.” Stories report on the experiences and aspirations of local communities, then connect local issues to the candidates running for public office. Other papers followed the example of the Observer, Rosen explains, because “everyone in journalism is tired of the horse race as a master narrative.”40 What is different about this form of campaign reform is that it addresses the most fundamental requirement for effective electoral rejection—the development of voters’ policy views. Attempts to regulate campaign discourse or provide more information on the candidates take for granted that the voters already know what they want from their elected representatives. Chapter 3 demonstrates that, in fact, most voters do not understand government and politics very well and often fail to link their underlying values to even general policy preferences. By talking with voters and reporting those conversations in their newspapers, journalists simulate the face-to-face deliberation that helps citizens develop and recognize their interests. In this way, a newspaper can help its readers by both arriving at evaluative criteria and applying those criteria systematically to candidates. Were all voters newspaper readers and all newspapers supportive of this innovative form of public journalism, American elections might produce different results. Unfortunately, neither of those preconditions exists, nor are they likely to. Newspapers are businesses, and if those businesses decide that such coverage boosts advertising revenue through an expanded affluent readership, then papers might change their coverage. There is no strong evidence to that effect, but it is not an inconceivable evolution.

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The more fundamental problem is that newspaper readers are already and will always be the most informed and sophisticated voters.41 Other voting guides, whether printed or on the Internet, have the same drawback. A study of the California voting guide, for instance, found that 92 percent of users were regular voters even in primary elections. The majority of users had a bachelor’s degree, with 28 percent of all users having obtained a graduate degree. This is not to say that such a guide has no benefit: over two-thirds of the users surveyed found the voting guide “very helpful.”42 The problem is that conventional voting guides and innovative newspaper coverage of elections do not reach the average citizen. Ironically, these rich sources of political information reach the voters who need them the least. DELIVERING INFORMATION TO THE VOTERS WHO NEED IT MOST For the electorate to reject unresponsive representatives, it is critical that even the less-attentive voters judge candidates effectively. Not only do these voters need better candidate information the most, they are also sometimes the most pivotal subgroup of the electorate. Because voters of low and moderate sophistication are less attached to political parties, they are often more independent. In close races, these swing voters can decide the outcome of an election. In the 1998 New York Senate race, for instance, polls conducted a month before election day showed Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato in a statistical tie with his Democratic opponent, Charles Schumer, with 10 percent of voters undecided. Just a week before the election, the results were the same, with the same percentage undecided.43 Though voter turnout and other factors influenced Schumer’s victory, his modest victory margin suggests that the undecided voters determined the outcome of the election. To take another example, a study of the 1992 general election in California found that late voters were the least partisan. Seventy-one percent of those who made up their minds before the election was well under way voted for candidates from the same party in the presidential and two U.S. Senate races that year. Only 56 percent of those who selected candidates during the campaign voted along party lines, and only 35 percent of those making a last-minute decision did so.44 If these critical voters do not have a reliable and efficient mechanism for candidate evaluation beyond simple partisanship, their electoral choices are unlikely to ensure accountability. Incumbents will win re-

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election on the strength of their familiarity, and challengers will normally defeat incumbents only when they can mount effective—albeit often unscrupulous, irrelevant, or single-issue—attacks on incumbents. To address this problem, chapter 7 presents a more effective method of providing useful information to even the least politically aware voters. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to consider the public’s second form of response—its voice.

CHAPTER 5

Public Expression in American Politics As it is essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common interest with the people, so it is particularly essential that the [House of Representatives] . . . should have an immediate dependence on and an intimate sympathy with the people. The Federalist, No. 52 (attributed to James Madison)

From 1970 to 1977, Richard Fenno traveled with and interviewed eighteen members of Congress to study their interaction with local constituencies. Fenno discovered that successful representatives devote considerable energy to developing positive relationships with the most active residents of their districts. The most time-consuming activity for a congressional office is constituent service, which includes everything from helping a small business navigate the tax code to rushing a visa application for a forgetful traveler. At district meetings, moreover, representatives spend much of their time with individual citizens and groups of constituents. Members of Congress use these services and meetings to build up the name recognition, general favorability, and positive personality attributions that win votes in low- and mediumintensity elections. Fenno observed the representatives present themselves “in such a way that the inferences drawn by those watching will be supportive.” The representatives themselves called these inferences “trust.” According to Fenno, a constituent who trusts a representative is saying: I am willing to put myself in your hands temporarily; I know you will have opportunities to hurt me, although I may not know when those opportunities occur; I assume—and I will continue to assume until it is proven otherwise—that you will not hurt me; for the time being, then, I’m not going to worry about your behavior.1

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To earn the trust of their constituents, successful representatives meet regularly with their constituents and gladly respond to specific concerns that have only minor policy implications. When future voters speak in a whisper about local or even private concerns, the representative listens carefully because a constructive response can earn that voter’s trust and, come election day, support. These representatives seek to build up the loyalty of voters, because the greater their loyalty, the less likely they will be to attempt collective electoral rejection. Instead, when a loyal constituent has a substantive concern about a policy decision that may harm his or her interests, the loyal citizen uses some form of public voice. When these direct contacts take the form of a letter, for example, congressional representatives reply using any of a number of available computer programs that generate relevant and often detailed responses. One Wisconsin congressman, Republican Scott Klug, permitted a reporter to scrutinize his mail operation in 1992, and the reporter found that Klug’s staff had thousands of sentences and paragraphs it could piece together for any given reply. On the topic of agriculture alone, there were more than nine hundred separate responses.2 As more and more citizen input comes in the form of e-mail, citizens (and interest groups that organize them) are increasing the speed and volume of their correspondence and increasing the likelihood that replies will be automatic and standardized.3 Some letter writers might appreciate a form reply, but this is not the kind of responsiveness that is central to the model introduced in chapter 2. In that model, effective voice causes substantive changes in the behavior of an elected representative.4 In contemporary American politics, many public and private institutions aim to give voice to public concerns. In this chapter, I examine four different forms of public voice: public opinion polls, public hearings, talk radio, and direct lobbying. These forms of voice are by no means exhaustive of the institutions that citizens can use for political influence, but they illustrate the range of mechanisms the public uses to make itself heard. In evaluating these modes of expression, it is useful to consider the characteristics of a fully democratic public voice.5 When thought of as a collective entity made up of many individual perspectives and concerns, the public’s voice should have four basic qualities in a democratic political system: voice should be representative, deliberative, articulate, and influential. The public’s voice is representative when it brings into harmony the many voices among subgroups of the larger public, or

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it can be representative simply by incorporating separate views in a discordant but inclusive voice. A deliberative public voice emerges only after a period of informed discussion and reflection oriented toward discerning a clear and mutually acceptable policy direction. When deliberation arrives at a general decision, the public’s voice needs to become articulate by pointing toward concrete public policy options. Without such clear direction, the public’s voice remains strong in spirit but vague in intention. Once articulated, the public’s voice needs to prove influential if it is to serve its original purpose. Only when voice affects actual policy decisions does it serve the public interests that sparked it and reinforce the civic habits and institutions that gave rise to it. As I argue below, different conventional modes of public expression illustrate each of these features of ideal democratic voice, but none brings all four together. PUBLIC OPINION POLLS When citizens contact their representatives, they normally speak as individuals or members of a subgroup of the larger citizenry. By letter, phone call, postcard, or e-mail, an individual asks to be heard among all other voices. Public opinion polls, which purport to speak for the whole, in the form of a stream of percentages, are an unusual but popular form of public voice. In Numbered Voices, the political communication scholar Susan Herbst explains that only in the modern era has our political culture equated the abstract concept of public opinion with a specific form of measurement—the mass opinion survey. Previously, straw polls, crowd counts, and other methods were used to gauge public opinion. Public opinion surveys have become conventional because they are more consistent with the Western cultural obsessions with rationality and quantification.6 SURVEYS AS REPRESENTATIVE AND ARTICULATE VOICE

Many observers, including Herbst, have criticized public opinion polling as a form of public expression, but well-designed polls have one dramatic advantage over nearly all other forms of voice: they provide a representative portrait of the public’s views. This is a result of both the design and the conducting of polls. Most modern public surveys in America are conducted by telephone, by mail, or through door-to-door interviews, and these survey methods usually provide relatively bal-

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anced samples of public opinion. Telephone surveys are probably the most common, because they are quick and relatively cheap, and they obtain adequate response rates. The best phone surveys use randomdigit dialing to reach both listed and unlisted numbers, and they provide a relatively random sample of the public. This technique misses the fraction of the American public without phones and oversamples households with multiple phone lines, but it also misses people who refuse to answer calls from interviewers and those who are rarely at home. The net result is a happy coincidence of complementary sampling errors— the systematic undersampling of both the low and high ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.7 A more subtle reason for the representativeness of mass opinion polls is the intimate setting of a survey interview. Whether face-to-face, on the phone, or via mail, survey respondents have a privacy quite unlike more public forms of voice. The interviewer assures the respondent that all responses are confidential and that the researchers will report only aggregate results or anonymous verbatim responses. For many respondents, this allows a candor that they rarely consider appropriate or socially acceptable. Respondents also understand that the survey gives them a certainty that their voices will be counted among others. An inarticulate or reserved citizen called on the phone by an interviewer suddenly has a chance to speak honestly and directly to all who care to listen without fear of reprisal or recrimination. The result is that mass opinion polls sometimes uncover a balance of public opinion that political life obscures. Michael MacKuen gives a straightforward example of this phenomena in one American city: St. Louis is a Catholic town. It is also pro-life. All three members of Congress and both Senators are pro-life. Members of the state legislature have continuously voted measures intended to circumvent Roe v. Wade. When an enormous sign advertising that “God is Pro-Life” was argued to be larger than allowed by city ordinance, the city council ruled it was not advertising but instead a work of art. That St. Louis is pro-life is a simple social fact. Yet, public opinion surveys of the area show that residents of St. Louis are much like Americans in general, marginally favoring the pro-choice position.8

MacKuen sees the implications clearly: “When portions of the public are silenced, then politics may ignore their preferences and plainly violate elementary democratic norms. Being unable to open discussion, current losers cannot even hope to persuade fellow citizens for the future.”9 By contrast, when public opinion polls thrust contrary views into

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the public debate, an unnoticed minority or even a genuine “silent majority” can begin to speak with a distinct voice. Were public opinion polls representative in their sampling of public opinion but inarticulate in their expression of it, they would have little value. Part of what makes polls so valuable is that they provide succinct statements of the public’s views. When interviewers ask their questions in a straightforward manner and provide respondents with simple, balanced response scales, one can succinctly summarize the survey results. For example, in 1994, the National Opinion Research Center asked Americans, “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?” Seventy-four percent said that they favored use of the death penalty, 19 percent opposed it, and 6 percent said they didn’t know or gave no response. Though the meanings of words shift over time, one can have some confidence that support for this form of penalty has increased since 1974, when the same question resulted in 63 percent supporting “the death penalty for persons convicted of murder.”10 Some polling organizations have tried to make poll results even more policy-relevant by routinely linking their questions to specific public policy proposals and injecting their poll results into ongoing debates. One of the most ambitious efforts in this spirit was the ten-year experiment conducted by the Americans Talk Issues Foundation (ATI). ATI conducted a series of studies on diverse domestic and foreign policy issues in an effort to “know and to disseminate what the public itself wants for governance.”11 By asking probing sets of questions with varied wording, ATI found that very large majorities of the public supported numerous policies that had not yet been adopted or even entered the public debate. For example, the ATI found strong public support for using the United Nations as the primary response mechanism in cases of international aggression, limiting campaign contributions to residents of representatives’ own districts, and adopting uniform international standards for toxic waste. Though ATI’s surveys have not always had the desired impact, this may stem in part from the idiosyncratic, iconoclastic style in which it presents itself and its results. In any case, the ATI surveys provide a detailed record of the general public’s views on important public issues.12 CRITICISMS OF PUBLIC OPINION SURVEYS

Conventional polling is by no means a perfect method of eliciting the public’s voice, although only some of its failings are inevitable. Public

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opinion polls do not, in fact, provide perfect random samples of the public, and their failure to do so is most serious when the undersampled population’s views differ from those of the general public. To take an extreme example, the homeless population has needs and worries of a kind and degree that most Americans do not share, yet every form of survey—even the U.S. Census—has great difficulty including this group in its sample of respondents. If a survey tried to measure general support for publicly financed free toilets in parks, it might find some support among those who hoped such facilities would reduce the visibility of the discomfort of the homeless, but the homeless themselves, despite their more direct stake in the issue, would mostly not be heard. Another problem with even elaborate surveys is that they measure public opinion without extensive deliberation. Typical surveys last fewer than thirty minutes and address many issues in rapid succession. A survey might ask a set of five-to-ten questions on an issue to get a general sense of the public’s views, or a survey might ask a single question to address a broad issue. Surveys that try to go into greater depth on a concrete policy debate sometimes devote ten minutes to an issue and juxtapose policy questions with a relatively long preface to give respondents background information. A few exceptional surveys go one step farther and give interviewers scripted lines that permit them to engage in a structured debate with respondents, such that one response elicits a counterargument and follow-up question from the interviewer. For instance, a national survey on the government’s role in preventing job discrimination used counterarguments to shift respondents’ views: when initially asked if the government should “see to it that blacks get fair treatment in jobs,” two-thirds supported government action; after hearing both liberal and conservative counterarguments to respondents’ initial policy choices, the net result was only 42 percent support for government intervention to prevent job discrimination.13 Such surveys reveal the importance of delving beneath surface-level public opinion, but they cannot simulate sufficient discussion to measure the public’s fully informed or enlightened interests adequately. Without deliberation, public opinion polls risk oversimplifying the public’s views and misrepresenting both the depth of disagreement and potential common ground. Ironically, it is the danger of willful and careless misrepresentation that makes this most representative form of public voice hazardous. In some cases, the public survey sample is nonrandom. Though familiarity with sample bias may make the public and the media more cautious in

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their interpretation of surveys, it is remarkable how often and to what effect such surveys are used. Politicians routinely survey their districts to accomplish many purposes, and their mail surveys generally obtain very low response rates and unrepresentative samples. Nonetheless, officials sometimes refer to those biased polls to defend their policy votes. Interest groups and other political organizations conduct similar surveys to show support for a particular policy or simply to raise money. Even virtuous organizations and public entities regularly cite the “interesting results” of nonrandom public opinion surveys that they concede are “nonscientific.” Though a sample may be randomly drawn, its responses may still mislead because of the way in which the survey questions were asked. Volumes have been written on the methods by which pollsters misrepresent public opinion through biased questions, tricky phrasings, unbalanced response scales, and clever item-ordering. Political campaigns, for example, sometimes give opponents unflattering descriptions in their surveys, then claim imminent victory by revealing their candidate’s strong showing in the biased poll. (Campaigns are rarely forthcoming about the full wording and methodological details of their surveys.) The apparent public support for the Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America” was also based upon willful misrepresentation of public opinion, although that egregious case included distortion even of the poll results themselves.14 More commonly, however, survey results are misleading because of poorly worded questions, typified by Alan Kay as equivalent to: “Would you like a free lunch?”15 In the long run, these biases in survey sampling, question design, and the reporting of results undermine the credibility of even well-crafted surveys. This has a direct effect on the influence of public opinion polls, which are hamstrung by the common perception that one cannot trust survey results. Every time public officials and citizens learn of fraud or deception in a poll, especially when they discover it firsthand, it makes them less likely to believe the next survey findings they read or hear. Given the widespread use of biased and false surveys in political and commercial ad campaigns, it is not surprising that considerable skepticism has accumulated regarding surveys as a whole. More indirectly, this skepticism may erode response rates in surveys, as the most cynical subgroup of citizens becomes unwilling to participate when asked to do so. This could result in a genuine bias in survey samples over time.16 On the other hand, some critics fault public opinion surveys for being too powerful. Some critics argue that surveys can foreclose in-

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clusive political debate and other forms of public expression. Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann argues that public opinion polls (and similar mechanisms) can create a “spiral of silence.” When polls reveal a majority view, the most malleable members of the minority shift over to the majority view or simply silence (or lie about) their own views. The next poll then shows an even larger majority, which similarly influences the next-most impressionable subset of the remaining minority. As this cycle continues, the majority view spirals outward to absorb, or at least silence, more and more of public opinion.17 Research on opinion shifts in response to information about the views of others, however, provides only mixed support for the “spiral of silence” thesis. Hearing about public opinions does prompt people to reflect upon their own views. For less informed voters, the result can be a shift toward the more popular view. Among more involved and informed voters, this same selfreflection process often results in the strengthening of their original views, even if those clash with majority public opinion.18 Another criticism is that surveys limit the range of ways in which the public expresses its views. Anointed the one, true king of public opinion measures, random-sample surveys make even large-scale demonstrations and civil disobedience seem unrepresentative, if not irresponsible. By mediating citizens’ opinions through forced-choice questions and statistical summaries, surveys also dampen the strength and volume of the public’s voice, which can speak more boldly at a rally or in a public meeting. In this view, a political system should recognize survey research as nothing more than one among many worthy methods for measuring the public’s sentiments.19 Benjamin Ginsberg points out that the commercial and political origins of poll data compound this problem: Given the commercial character of the polling industry, differences between the polls’ concerns and those of the general public are probably inevitable. Polls generally raise questions that are of interest to clients and purchasers of poll data—newspapers, political candidates, government agencies, business corporations, and so on. . . . Because they seldom pose questions about the foundation of the existing order, while constantly asking respondents to choose from among the alternatives defined by that order, . . . polls may help to narrow the focus of public discussion and to reinforce the limits on what the public perceives to be realistic political and social possibility.20

Notwithstanding that some academic and interest group surveys address questions that commercial and government polls ignore or avoid, there is merit in this view. Public opinion surveys can create a representative and articulate public voice, but they have difficulty spontaneously

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capturing the public’s underlying priorities. This is partly because of the institutional problem highlighted by Ginsberg, but it is also because surveys are not deliberative. Because public meetings are open-ended and permit extended discussion, some citizens look to them as a more deliberative form of public expression. FACE-TO-FACE MEETINGS WITH ELECTED OFFICIALS In a sense, public opinion polls bring together the numerous, discordant voices of a large public into a statistical arrangement. Sometimes the voices come together in a harmony of public consensus; sometimes the survey juxtaposes opposing views in a clear counterpoint. The orchestration permitted by closed-ended questions and quantitative summaries, however, can obscure the real dynamics and diversity of public voices on a given issue. A public hearing or meeting can bring these many voices into a single room and record their interplay. When this exchange of ideas and perspectives is inclusive of different perspectives, and involves attentive listening and clear articulation, it often amounts to genuine public deliberation. A sincere meeting between a school board and a group of concerned parents can change the way both parties view an issue, as well as how they see one another. Careful discussion and debate can cause people to critically examine the problem they face, their own perspectives, and the views of their opponents. This leads citizens toward a more enlightened understanding of their interests and a more accurate understanding of the policy problem under discussion. This, in turn, can lead to an articulate presentation of the public’s shared and divergent interests.21 In practice, many public meetings fail to achieve deliberation. The public hearing is an especially notorious form of public dialogue. Often required by federal, state, or local statutes, public hearings give citizens the opportunity to express their concerns and address questions directly to public officials. At a typical hearing, citizens take turns speaking before a panel of government agency employees and elected officials. The experience of Thomas Webler and Ortwin Renn, who have witnessed countless hearings in the United States and abroad, suggests that neither citizens nor policymakers value the public hearing process: To a citizen, the thought of attending a public hearing immediately conjures up negative images. Citizens often picture the public hearing process as disempowering. Typically, attendance is slight. To regulatory officials, experts, and project sponsors, the public hearing hall is a battle zone. Legal obliga-

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tions must be met, hopefully without raising the hackles of the local populace. A well-attended meeting is bad news.22

Webler and Renn suggest that public hearings usually fail to produce deliberative and influential public deliberation both because of their timing within the policymaking process and the “structure of discourse within the public hearing process.”23 When public officials schedule hearings late in the process after they have reached a preliminary (or final) decision, the hearing only permits citizens to complain or implore a change in plan. Under those circumstances, the process becomes adversarial, because citizens perceive that those “hearing” their input have already chosen to ignore it. A former county council member in Maryland explained that elected officials are no less cynical about hearings: One of my fellow council members would occasionally start a public hearing by announcing that he already knew what position each witness would take. And he was usually correct. I figure I spent nearly 2,000 hours in formal public hearings over the last eight years. It was not time well spent. Public hearings may give the appearance of public involvement, but they are unsatisfactory to citizen and official alike.24

The structure of discourse at public hearings is a more subtle problem. Even when an elected official convenes a hearing before making a decision, the typical public hearing encourages a nondeliberative process by restricting public expression to a series of statements and limiting official response to periodic counterpoints. Hearings also tend to have unduly technical issue framings that make it difficult for wellmeaning citizens to address officials in their own language.25 Daniel Fiorino, the director of the Waste and Chemical Policy Division at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledges that when agency hearings are held, they “usually do not allow interested parties much of a chance to engage in full discussions with the agency and other parties or to influence the outcome” on issues before the agency.26 One increasingly common form of quasi-hearing is what public officials call a “town hall” or “town meeting.” Officials invite the general public to these meetings to discuss a particular issue, and depending on the topic, timing, and advance publicity, the meeting rooms typically become either empty meditation chambers or rousing political theater houses. When attendance is light, there can be a pleasant informality at such affairs, but there is little discussion. The attendees include friendly party activists, one or two strangers who saw a note in the paper, and possibly a fretful lobbyist who has had trouble getting a one-on-one

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meeting with an official. The poor attendance can give representatives the impression that the public does not care about an issue, or that it endorses whatever position the official might have. Other town halls draw large crowds and often result in bedlam.27 When a group of elected officials in Madison, Wisconsin, held a public meeting in 1990 to discuss responses to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, hundreds of antiwar protesters dominated the meeting. In one impassioned speech after another, citizens demanded that their representatives take any actions they could to prevent a full-scale war between Iraq and the United States. “All of the oil in the Persian Gulf is not worth the life of one American man or woman,” exclaimed one veteran from Green Bay. When an Army officer from Whitewater spoke in support of President Bush, the crowd hissed, booed, and heckled her. In the end, however, the overwhelming opposition to war swayed none of the hawkish representatives present. One congressman even dared to defend his unchanged position. Republican Scott Klug, who had taken office just weeks before by carrying suburban towns and areas outside of Madison, argued that the public in attendance did not represent the views of voters in the surrounding areas. “I would have liked to have done this in Cross Plains or Stoughton,” he said. Given poor weather and treacherous highways, the meeting was dominated by antiwar activists, he believed, because few outside the city of Madison were able to attend.28 Residents of Minnesota gave similar antiwar speeches at a series of town meetings held by another newly elected representative, Democrat Paul Wellstone. The liberal senator agreed with the pacifist sentiments of the speakers he heard, and he used the meetings as the basis for an editorial released to the nation’s newspapers. In the Seattle Times, Wellstone’s comments ran under the headline, “Minnesota Message: War on Iraq Would Be a Terrible Mistake.” In the editorial, Wellstone explained that in response to his meeting announcements, “large crowds overflowed auditoriums in the cities of Minneapolis, Duluth, Rochester and St. Cloud and in the rural communities of Chisolm, Virginia and Marshall.” The meetings were not “scientific opinion polls,” but they served as a “lightning rod that attracted those with strong feelings about our nation’s policy in the Gulf.” Wellstone’s editorial describes the specific pleas of diverse attendees but never acknowledges any disagreement with his antiwar position. These meetings provided political ammunition for Wellstone, but they did not demonstrate a deliberative and influential public voice.29

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Not all public meetings resemble these extreme examples. Even if one looks only at the town meetings on the Gulf War, at least one member of Congress appeared to be swayed by such gatherings. The Virginia Democrat James Moran had argued that war with Iraq was justified, but he reversed his position following a public meeting in Alexandria. After the meeting, Moran told a reporter that he was surprised to hear the antiwar sentiment in a district peppered with military bases. “There’s a balance we in Congress have to strike between leadership and representation,” Moran explained. “I’m convinced the vast majority of the constituency that elected me to represent them is not prepared to go to war.”30 Few public meetings prove both deliberative and influential, but almost none are also representative. The voices that might have swayed Representative Moran were not heard from every corner of his district; rather, the few electric cries he heard were drawn by the “lightning rod” of a public meeting. He did not hear the flickering thoughts and soft voices of less involved, aroused, or mobile constituents because they did not take part in the public meetings. Many people, in fact, rarely resort to any form of active public expression, whether it be writing a letter to the editor or demonstrating in front of a government building. Most public representatives recognize this fact and, like the Wisconsin congressman mentioned above, dismiss contrary sentiments expressed at public meetings on those grounds. As an anonymous county commissioner remarked to one investigator, “I think frequently you get your vocal minority there instead of a balance of opinion.”31 Even if the vocal minority’s voice proves influential, it does so at the cost of being unrepresentative. TALK RADIO Face-to-face public meetings of citizens hardly make a sound compared to the clamor of daily debates in the mass media. For some democratic theorists, this is as it should be. As Benjamin Page argues, the sheer size and technological complexity of modern society almost certainly necessitate a division of labor in political expertise, policymaking, and communication. This is why we have professional policy experts, at universities, research organizations, and elsewhere, who deliberate about policy in a multitude of small groups of their own. It is also why we have professional politicians and why we have a representative, rather than direct, democracy.32

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In a sense, Page argues, the United States and similar nations rely upon a representative system of public deliberation. Thus, “The perennial problem of how to ensure that legislators properly represent their constituents has an analogue in the . . . problem [of] how to ensure representativeness by professional communicators,” who include “reporters, writers, commentators, and television pundits, as well as public officials and selected experts from academia or think tanks.”33 Even advocates of representative deliberation, however, acknowledge that this system of public expression does not always function properly. As I argue in chapter 3, the mass media, intellectual elites, and public officials often pursue agendas that conflict with the public’s interest.34 Page recognizes one problem in particular: The most prominent journalists, television commentators, and public officials tend to have much higher incomes than the average American and to live in very different circumstances. On certain class-related issues, it seems possible that these professional communicators may interpret events in ways that do not take the public’s values into account and may recommend policies contrary to those values.35

Because of this class difference, representative deliberation sometimes fails when there is little or no disagreement among policy elites, such as when the United States has a bipartisan foreign policy. Under these circumstances, the public often remains unaware of an important issue or its ramifications for the general population, and public tragedies like the wholesale collapse of savings and loan associations in the 1980s can follow a period of elite consensus, media indifference, and public ignorance.36 Even in these situations, the mass media can solve their own problems by providing alternative communication outlets, such as talk radio. To illustrate the importance of this form of public voice, Page offers the example of the Zoe Baird nomination. President Clinton had nominated Baird to be attorney general, and her confirmation appeared likely, despite the revelation that she and her husband had hired two illegal aliens to help with driving and baby-sitting. Baird’s bipartisan support eroded, however, and Clinton withdrew her nomination after a firestorm of public opposition. The criticisms of Baird flowed through call-in radio programs that encouraged listeners to talk about current issues. Callers to programs across the country were outraged that a law-breaker would serve as the highest-ranking law-enforcement official. Baird’s decision was sympathetically viewed by fellow members of the elite, but not by the general public. As one Boston talk-show host

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remarked, “I don’t think the average schmo says, ‘Hey, I know 15 people who have Peruvian live-in nannies.’ ” The evidence suggests that the criticism of Baird was a case of genuine popular backlash, rather than the result of behind-the-scenes orchestration.37 If talk radio is an important forum for the expression of the public’s voice, the next question concerns who takes part in this form of discussion. As anyone who has listened to talk radio knows, the host’s perspective is more important than those of the callers, because the on-air personality sets the topic and tone of a show. Although Jerry Brown, the former Democratic governor of California, created the We The People Radio Show, successful liberal hosts are rare in the upper echelons of talk radio. Political conservatives, however, have large followings. Table 8 shows that there is not one clear liberal among the most popular shows in the nation. The top-rated political programs include only conservatives, some of whom proudly wave the flag for the Republican Party (Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan), while others express conservative views without the party label (Dr. Laura, Art Bell, Jim Bohannon). One might mistake Howard Stern and his forerunner, Don Imus, for quasi-liberals because of their openness to unusual points of view. These “shock jocks,” however, rarely dwell on political matters. Stern, Imus, and their innumerable local imitators devote their shows to perverted or simply strange guests and topics, and when their talk becomes political, they identify themselves as libertarians as much as anything else. Not only do the hosts of the political talk radio programs in the United States consistently present issues from a conservative perspective, they are also notorious for their intolerance of opposing views. The on-air personalities of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, two of the most successful and trend-setting conservative hosts, include a macho arrogance inhospitable to sustained counterargument and self-